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

close to mythic figures as the real world allowed. Walking down the street with Edge or Bono, I would see on the faces of pedestrians the same reaction as the cabbie or child in a Marvel comic book whenever Spider-Man swooped by: Eyes would widen, mouths would gape, and they’d point, as if they’d just seen a giraffe.
    So now Edge and Bono were making the case that Peter Parker was “an indie kid, like Kurt Cobain before Nirvana”—back when Kurt was considered the geekiest kid in his high school. After Peter is beat up at school, what he sang had to feel real .
    Bono closed his eyes to concentrate. “I hear it as bummed-out garage rock.”
    Bono then sang the verse while demonstrating how to “walk home dejectedly.” He started at the back of the room and slinked toward us, moving with the feline yet masculine strides only rock stars can get away with.
    Edge grimaced. “Could you try and be more like the geeks?”
    “Edge is giving me geek lessons,” explained Bono, apologetically.
    “He’s having a hard time,” said Edge, shaking his head with a grin.
    Moments later, however, the room was shot through with tension as Julie insisted with an unnerving fervor how “Think Again” (Arachne’s song of vengeance) needed to get to “an unearthly, terror-rising, terrifying moment.” She explained how Arachne was so enraged by Peter Parker’s betrayal, she was now “pulling the vaults of heaven and hell into her presence . ”
    Like Arachne, Julie herself seemed to possess this frightening capacity to rain down retribution. The day after I landed the Spider-Man job, a former assistant director for The Lion King told me how he witnessed Julie dressing down an assistant designer for wasting her time. He said he had never seen anything like it: “It was like one of those sixteenth-century disembowelments.”
    In Julie and Elliot Goldenthal’s Grendel, the moment comes when the monster embraces its monstrous nature and unleashes a juggernaut of havoc. In Julie’s short film Fool’s Fire, the dwarf-jester Hopfrog brings down destruction on his royal tormentors. The climax of Titus, Julie’s first feature-length film, has the title character slaking his thirst for revenge in an orgy of cannibalism and carnage. Through the large glass windows of Edge’s guesthouse, we could see storm clouds rolling in from the Irish Sea, and as Julie conveyed Arachne’s fury, you could half believe it was Julie summoning those clouds. When I yowl at my five-year-old to stop jumping on the furniture, he bursts with laughter because I look like an idiot. Julie, on the other hand, possessed a demigod-like talent to unleash chthonic weather systems capable of sending wild beasts scattering. And all I could think whenever I witnessed one of these exhibitions was, God, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. And, of course, one day  . . . I would.
    But for now, faith and fellowship were ever-blooming. Bono and Edge were bona fide collaborators. It wasn’t sheer luck or a random fact that they’d been working together since the 1970s, oreven that Bono’s wife, Ali, was Bono’s high school sweetheart. The collaborative ethic was in their bones. I mean, with their résumés? Edge and Bono could have acted sniffy with me. But they didn’t . They banished every idea of an artistic hierarchy. They made the days and minutes about the work .
    If Bono seemed a little sapped during our meetings this week, we can cut him some slack—his mornings were spent in international diplomacy, his afternoons on writing songs, and his evenings being the father of four. And “sapped” is relative—he was still overflowing with ideas—good ones, lousy ones, it didn’t matter because there was always another one on the way.
    And even though Bono did more of the talking, you could catch him every now and then glancing toward Edge with the same expression I hope I’ll be wearing for my wife in our garden as we tend to the