by Andreas Kessaris for Curtians Up!
“…this whole book is a story about storytelling – the story of an epic attempt by earnest human beings to tell a story and tell it brilliantly.”
-Glen Berger
Anyone who knows me well is aware that live theater is not my favorite form of entertainment. And that goes especially so for the musical theater; I have always considered musicals to be silly fare, and show tunes quite lame. (Give me The Blues Brothers and Streets of Fire over Showboat and Oklahoma! any day). My attitude changed slightly in the late ‘90’s when I had a new girlfriend I was trying to impress so for our first trip together, a Labour Day weekend road excursion, I took her to see Man of La Mancha at the Stratford Festival. To my surprise I ended up getting into the show, and found myself whistling The Impossible Dream for several days afterward. (By the way, mission accomplished; we ended up staying together for years). So when I heard that they were planning a musical based on Spider-Man, my interest was piqued. And when I heard Bono and Edge from U2 where writing the songs, my interest was further piqued. Said interest came to a climax when a segment about the play aired on 60 Minutes, (the scenes they showed from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark looked spectacular, some are still on YouTube and well worth checking out), and they devoted an entire edition of The Late Show with David Letterman to the troubled production in an attempt to deflect all the negative publicity.
Song of Spider-Man by Glen Berger, (co-author of the book of the play), is a detailed behind-the-scenes account of the making of “the most controversial musical in Broadway history”; when Murphy’s Law was in full force and the events that transpired backstage were more dramatic than the product the public saw.
Glen Berger is an experienced and successful playwright and Emmy award-winning TV writer, but in this chronicle of the six-years he spent working on Turn Off the Dark, his inexperience with non-fiction is at times distracting and annoying. Especially. His. Amateurish. Use. Of. One. Word. Sentences. For. Emphasis. Which. Is. One. Of. My. Pet. PEEVES. (See how asinine that is?) The author narrates his story like a voice-over in a Woody Allen film; neurotic with a touch of sarcasm, which doesn’t always work on the printed page, but at least his dry asides and witty observations are amusing enough to keep the book from becoming too heavy while we watch his desperation increase as opening night gets closer, and then farther away. He does, however, have the habit of telegraphing his punches for instant comedic gratification, (I prefer it when payoffs come much later…set up a joke in Chapter 3, then give us the punch line in Chapter 12, believe me that’s much more fun).
Despite its faults, Song of Spider-Man somehow never fails to be interesting, working best when offering an inside look at the pitfalls of the collaborative creative process. The boring legal details are kept mercifully short, and Berger avoids making any serious judgments himself, even though the narrative is entirely from his point of view, allowing the reader draw their own conclusions.
The original Broadway run of Turn Off the Dark closed on January 4th, 2014, (but plans are underway to re-open it in Las Vegas in 2015). There is even talk in of making it into a live-action motion picture. I wouldn’t mind seeing that production in any of its aforementioned forms. But if Song of Spider-Man was ever made into a movie, I would definitely queue up for a ticket.
