Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History Read Online Free PDF Page A

Misérables to the stage, was brought on by David Garfinkle to be “line producer.” Martin lived in Australia, but when the time was right, he would move to New York and carry on in the role Tony Adams was meant to play. Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were instructed to start composing music, because a crucial staged reading was just twelve months away.
    Julie flew to Èze, in the South of France, to meet with them. As Julie explained to her co-bookwriter: the last time she had gone to the French Riviera to meet with our composer/lyricists, Neil Jordan was the fourth member of the creative team.
    “So best not to bring you over this time, Glen. Emotions are still a bit brittle.”
    Still?
    “I want to pave the way for you. But next time, I promise.”
    In France, Julie took Bono and Edge step by step through the treatment, and the boys played Julie a half-dozen songs. Rough demos. Just themes, really. They didn’t have any lyrics yet. Bono sang extemporaneously over the tracks in a language Edge called (in Bono’s honor) “bongelese”—a smattering of intelligible words and phrases mixed with a lot of random phonemes. Over the deeply somber piano chords of what would become the anthem “Rise Above,” Bono sang:
    Cause the sense is in the side
    Cause the marble’s in the slow
    And the sheepers in your heart
    In batten you will grow . . .
    On the page it’s silliness, but with the music, it really wasn’t. In fact, in song after song, the emotional content was so clear and untainted by left-brain comprehension I began to wonder whether I was going to prefer bongelese to the lads’ actual lyrics.
    The tunes themselves were exciting. Everyone thought so. Julie captured them on a shabby miniature tape recorder as Edge played the songs from his computer. But through the wobble and distortion, we could hear that the demos were mysterious, playful, varied . . . theatrical .
    “Arachne’s Theme” was a series of descending notes that managed to sound ancient, grand, and foreboding. And a riff they called “Boy Falls From the Sky” was going to be the driving electric-guitar-fueled hit of our musical. Which, according to David Garfinkle’s schedule, was opening in previews in Chicago on August 21, 2008. Two years from today. So it was time to startwriting that script. Julie might suggest a line or two, but I was expected to generate all the dialogue. I then had to submit it all to Julie. If she rejected a word or a sentence, there would be no arguing—just a frogmarch back to the keyboard.
    Julie liked her scenes written with concision, and always with an eye toward how it would play a hundred rows back. So our main characters had to be designed with the capacity to be played big while retaining their integrity. We couldn’t have the actors resort to shtick and mugging. So Peter Parker would be a charmingly fumbling teenager. He’d have an endearing, self-deprecating humor whenever he was around his unrequited love or confronted with bullies looking to do him harm. I had Peter covered. And newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson? He was already well established in the last forty years of comic books, TV episodes, and movies as an obsessive, cigar-chomping, self-righteous, self-promoting penny-pincher. He was like a stock character out of commedia dell’arte—a form Julie had often dipped into, most recently in her Green Bird on Broadway. You couldn’t ask for a more “theatrical” character. Arachne had no dialogue until the final scene of the show, so I wasn’t going to worry about her quite yet. The Green Goblin? In my audition scene, he was a Tom Waitsian carnival barker. A loose-limbed philosophizer, with wild mood swings and a happy unawareness of other people’s personal space. Standard supervillain/trickster tropes, but no point reinventing the wheel.
    But what about Goblin’s pre-supervillain incarnation as scientist Norman Osborn? Julie was unimpressed by the character in the first movie, as embodied