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

Author: Glen Berger | Language: English | ISBN: 1451684568 | Format: EPUB

Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History Description

Review

"You close Song of Spider-Man knowing two things you didn’t after seeing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Mr. Berger knows how to write, and he can tell a good story." (Mark Harris New York Times)

“[A] juicy and entertaining Broadway bildungsroman… a clear-eyed tale of hubris and humiliation.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“An absorbing…account of one of show biz's more bizarre real-life adventures.” (USA Today)

"Hilarious and engrossing. . . Despite the fact that the project he is most associated with never received better than mixed reviews, one imagines that Berger surely considers himself first and foremost a dramatist. How inconvenient for his self-conception that he’s written one of the best literary works of this year." (Nicholas Mancusi Miami Herald-Tribune)

“An entertaining tell-all about this infamous musical that, in the fall of 2010, made headlines almost every day….an accurate and candid account.” (Michael Riedel New York Post)

“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark turned out to be a dud, but Berger’s book is one of the best recent accounts of the making and unmaking of a big Broadway show.” (Connecticut Post)

“This juicy memoir offers up the requisite dirt to make a satisfying read for Broadway carrions and disaster junkies alike….This book should be required reading for all theater students.” (TheaterMania.com)

About the Author

Glen Berger cut his teeth at Seattle’s Annex Theatre back in the ’90s. His plays since then include Underneath the Lintel, which has been staged more than two hundred times worldwide, been translated into eight languages, and won several Best Play awards; and O Lovely Glowworm, a 2005 Portland Drammy Award Winner for Best Script. He is a New Dramatists alumnus. In television, Glen has won two Emmys (out of twelve nominations), and has written more than 150 episodes for children’s television series including Arthur (PBS), Peep (Discovery/The Learning Channel), Big and Small (BBC), and Fetch (PBS), for which he was the head writer for all five years of its run. Glen spent six years cowriting the script of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

 

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (November 5, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1451684568
• ISBN-13: 978-1451684568
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Glen Berger is the co-author of the "book" -- the words other than the song lyrics -- for the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. He stuck with the play through more than six years of drafts, rewrites, the firing of superstar director Julie Taymor, the complete revamping of the show, and -- finally -- the relative success of the new version.

I saw the original version of Spider-Man and it was, by far, the worst experience I have ever had in a theater. The plot was incoherent, the music (by Bono and The Edge of U2) was mediocre -- and the lyrics were often unintelligible because of the muddy sound system -- the attempts at humor fell flat, and the attempts at transmitting a message fell even flatter. Berger was clearly responsible for some of these problems … and yet, he has written a terrific book about his experiences.

I'm not sure what I was expecting -- probably a hatchet job laying all of the blame on Taymor -- but what I got was a funny, insightful, candid, honest, even-handed attempt to make sense of his long experience with this play. Sure Taymor comes off as a bit of an inflexible egomaniac -- and her tendency to blow up at the expense of assistant set directors and the like, is very unappealing -- but Berger bends over backward to play it straight, and, at least as far as I can see, he succeeds.

Clearly, Berger should be kept far away from writing Broadway musicals, by the use of machine gun nests backed up by drones, if necessary. But he should be encouraged to write more first-person nonfiction. I don't know what else he has done in his life that he can write about, but on the basis of this book, I would be happy to read his account of walking his dog and brushing his teeth.

I have never seen Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. The first person I knew who had seen Spider-Man was actually present during the infamous December 20, 2010 preview performance when an actor fell 30 feet into the pit in front of the stage during a botched stunt. Like most people, I followed the weekly horrors of our favorite neighborhood Spider-Man in those early days with a nearly sick since of delight and a large helping of schadenfreude. Who thought this would be a good idea in the first place?

Glen Berger's book, honestly, is about a million times better than it has any right to be. I mean that in a positive sense, because after all, he's writing about a show (as he astutely points out in the first chapter). That's it. Just a show. However, through his narrative style (which, I will admit, took a bit of time to get used to), his frequent, but significant, diversions and allusions, as well as his almost frighteningly specific recollections of every thought and feeling he must have had during his six year long chronology with the musical, I am presently more interested in seeing this show than I had ever been! The fact that the show is still running three years after it's first flawed preview performance is a testament to something -- or, perhaps more accurately, a lot of somethings -- and since I missed the first iteration of the show, I am now looking forward to not missing the current one.

Having never seen the musical, I wasn't sure how accessible the book would be. Luckily, it was extremely. Additionally, all of the early buzz on the book was that it was a "tell-all" (perhaps, sure, it is...) and that Julie Taymor was raked over hot coals in the book (she will probably feel that she was, but I, however, didn't really feel that way).

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