Free Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History by Glen Berger

his most innocent voice. “ ‘Pussies’ is a term of endearment. It’s pussy cat. Do you not have that expression here?”
    “No,” Julie said with her stern librarian face. “ ‘Pussies’ is ‘pussy.’   ”
    “Oh.”
    Julie flashed Edge a grin and then got serious. It was crucial to her—to all of us—that Turn Off the Dark wasn’t just going to be a cotton candy entertainment, dissolving in the audience’s memories as soon as the show ended. She wanted to deliver a positive idea to all the kids in the audience: “You don’t like the world? Change it .” This, Julie said, was the entire message in Across the Universe . It was the baby boomers delivering a message to the Millennials; a message that could be boiled down, as Julie put it, to “Get off your asses.”
    Edge said they would put the song back on the blocks and deliver something soon. Julie then hurried off to her next appointment, but not before saying with gratitude and sincerity, “It’s just a beautiful musical. . . . I love it.”
    •     •     •
    But how feasible was this beautiful musical? That was the one question to be answered before the producers could make any serious commitment to a theatre and a schedule.
    Dragging the intangible into the tangible world is a tricky business.
    We were about to take a huge leap into a world where physics was actually applicable, where the immutable laws of gravity existed. From this point forward, motors, winches, and cables were going to be in the mix.
    Three months after the Chateau Marmont meeting, nearly everyone involved in Turn Off the Dark had traveled to the site where evil monkeys once took flight. On Sony’s historic Soundstage 27, where remnants of the yellow brick road were still under the floorboards, aerial designer Scott Rogers and choreographer Danny Ezralow had spent the last month trying to figure out how to render the trickiest Spider-Man production numbers on a stage. A little over two years ago and just a few hundred yards away, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews had hosted an intimate memorial service for Tony Adams. Now, Hello Entertainment had put up enough funds to rent a vast soundstage there, along with a tractor-trailer load of aerial rigging.
    With no heat in the airplane hangar–sized building, and Los Angeles in a cold snap, everyone was bundled in hats and coats as Scott Rogers prepared to demonstrate for the first time a dogfight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin.
    “Three, two, one, go!”
    The “Goblin Glider” is a levitating, bat-shaped boogie board that has been an iconic Goblin accessory ever since his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #14 in 1964. But acknowledging the difficulty of flying a Goblin performer on top of a Glider inside a theatre, Marvel granted Julie and Hello Entertainment a dispensation. The Green Goblin in this musical would instead have retractable wings—part of his genetic experiment gone wrong involving beetles and bats.
    So as cables whirred, our Goblin aerialist was lifted into the air. Wearing makeshift wings, he began sweeping around the room as if looking for his nemesis. Suddenly, an aerialist playing Spider-Man sprang twenty feet from behind a platform. As the Goblin sped toward him, Spider-Man leaped another fifteen feet, and then flipped in the air backward over the Goblin, between the two lines suspending the Goblin aerialist. Landing on the floor, he pivoted into an iconic Spider-Man crouch, prepared for the next sally. That jump between the two lines— that was the pay dirt. It had never been achieved in a theatre before.
    Our aerial designer—lanky, strapping Scott Rogers—had a drawl, an undaunted demeanor, and a commitment to conservative family values that contrasted merrily with the East Coast leftist theatre folk he had been hired to work with. Scott also had a high tolerance for getting flung around the air, and a doctorate-level understanding of parabolas. He would have made a