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

this assignment and ran with it. After an hour, I blanched. I was sure I’d figure out how to write the Geeks eventually. Hell yeah, I’d figure it out. . . . Eventually.
    •     •     •
    By the beginning of October, a ragged version of Act One was completed—just in time for a two-day summit in Bono’s Upper West Side penthouse apartment. I didn’t know U2’s music the first time I met Bono and Edge—it was easier to be indifferent around them. But now I was a hard-core fan, with their entire catalogue committed to heart. So I should’ve been producing flop sweat like crazy. But trying to get pages written in the days leading up to this conference had turned me into a sleep-deprived shell of a former self. I shuffled into Bono’s den and took in the surroundings and the excited banter of my collaborators like some quietly amused Peruvian sloth, and when Julie suggested I read the script out loud to our composers, I launched into the show unthinkingly.
    Within minutes, Bono’s sunglasses were off and he and Edge were voicing approval, tossing new suggestions into the air, pointing out how the Girl Geek’s narration matched the sean-nós Gaelic singing style Bono had been considering for Arachne. Julie and I acted out the first scene between Peter and MJ—a scene relying on stumbling lines and long, horrible pauses in lieu of content. Through grins, Bono called it “kabuki,” “brutal,” and meanwhile I was marveling over my acting partner’s comic timing. Now Bono was playing Mary Jane’s abusive father, and Edge was convincingly playing gentle, well-meaning Uncle Ben as the four of us volleyed lines with increasing intensity until it culminated in a song yet to be written.
    Doing his best Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, Bono turned tome, tapping his fingers together. “How long have you been with us, Smithers? You’re going to get on very well in this corporation.”
    Well gee, this was getting gratifying . . .
    Your life seems to be going in one direction, and then suddenly you wake up on the ceiling, with strange new powers. That’s when Peter sings “Spun Around” (later renamed “Bouncing Off the Walls”), another song needing music and lyrics.
    “There’s an expression in our band which we use all the time,” said Bono. “A ‘throw yourself around the room’ song. I think this might be the place for one of those.”
    Indeed. Seeing as Julie wanted to stage the scene with Peter actually throwing himself around the room . With the help of cables, the actor was going to leap and flip from wall to wall. And then the whole bedroom was going to break apart, and Peter would dance toward the high school with the Geeks cheering him on.
    Bono told us his definition of a “geek”: “a person full of passion, unencumbered by cool.” And he wasn’t wrong. Julie demonstrated a silly ecstatic dance for the song right there in Bono’s living room as Bono scatted a tune, improvising something sounding like the joyous flipside to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” He and Julie played off each other, flirting and daft, while Edge studied them with a grin, and I gaped at these goofballs who were skipping and gesticulating, pulling faces, exclaiming, and just . . . playing .
    And like the old fellow in Krapp’s Last Tape, this is the scene I rewind over and over again. Stupefaction . Rewind. Play again. There’s Julie buck dancing, or doing the Charleston, or whatever the hell she was doing in that room of giggling and twinkling inspiration, and yet almost exactly five years later, the New York Post was depicting the Inferno reimagined by Julie Taymor. In the ninth circle of hell, “dangling from two of [Satan’s] three mouths are Bono and The Edge, ‘their backs being skinnedso as to leave not a patch.’ In the third mouth, being ground head first, is the greatest traitor of all—Taymor’s cowriter, Glen Berger.”
    To get from a scene of collaboration and affection to this