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

by Willem Dafoe. She felt a soulless entrepreneur wasn’t a fraction as sympathetic or compelling as, say, Alfred Molina’s scientist in Spider-Man 2 . In that film, Otto Octavius’s earnest desire to save the world through technology led to his accidental transformation into supervillain Doctor Octopus.
    So we’d make Norman Osborn a brilliant scientist and humanitarian who believed that “speeding up evolution” was the only way to save humanity from Earth’s imminent ecological implosion. However, Norman’s fears that competitors would steal his work would lead him to rush his research, resulting in his accidental transformation into the Green Goblin.
    At Èze, Edge remembered encounters with media mogul Ted Turner. Bono jumped at this, recalling the time they went for a walk in the fields with Ted and his assistant. Ted was holding forth on one topic after another when suddenly he spied a snake on the ground and reached to pick it up. His assistant cautioned him that it was a poisonous copperhead, which Ted dismissed.
    “That’s no copperhead.”
    “But—”
    “Nah, the hell it is, honey, the—ah GEEZ, you’re right!”
    Ted jumped back in fear and then, not missing a beat, added, “Hey, I’m gonna keep her.” And right on talking and trudging through the tall grass he went.
    An enthusiastic, fast-talking genius from Georgia with a soapbox always at the ready. Someone who could launch into the patter of an auctioneer or preach salvation like a Baptist minister with the zeal of The Music Man’s Henry Hill? Yeah, I could work with that. And hey, maybe we’d slow down that Southern accent once he was the Goblin. It would add a dash of Klansman, which would go just fine with the Goblin’s embrace of a perverse eugenics.
    The song demos played in an endless loop as I typed. Haunting, some of these songs, there was no doubt about it. Scene by scene the script began to take shape. The writing that September would have been going just fine, in fact, if it hadn’t been for . . . the Geeks .
    Julie feared that getting through the whole “origin story” before the end of Act One would be impossible without some narration.Before I was hired, she came up with the idea for a “Geek Chorus.” She claimed the pun was unintentional, but the concept for the Geeks was certainly similar to the role of the classical Greek chorus: Four teenagers—three boys and a girl—would remain onstage for the entire show, comment on the action, wax philosophical, and fill us in on all the plot points we didn’t have the time or wherewithal to dramatize. Employing a Geek Chorus was a good idea.
    Wasn’t it?
    Yes.
    Probably.
    We weren’t sure, actually. If they voiced the confused thoughts and feelings of Peter, it would eliminate the need for endless monologues. That would be helpful. They could add four spirited backup voices to any song. They could juice the whole show with fanboy passion. They could convey comically yet sincerely the veneration that comic books command.
    In theory, these were sound reasons to write a Geek Chorus into the show. But we decided to add a few more rules: They would have to sound like teenagers today. Fine. But no contemporary slang could be used, because what was hip today was dated tomorrow. So instead they’d speak in an argot that we would invent. Well . . . okay. That worked for West Side Story, I suppose. Oh—and to set these four teens apart from the rest of the characters in the show, they should speak in verse. Rhyming verse. But Julie was allergic to hip-hop, so even though everything that rhymes these days inevitably sounds like hip-hop, it mustn’t sound like hip-hop. But it shouldn’t sound like Dr. Seuss either. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. And the four characters should each have a distinct personality. But every now and then they should speak in unison. And they absolutely must be funny.
    I didn’t blanch. I have an indefatigable confidence in my writingabilities, so I took