New York:
Nine years in the making, the moment came on Saturday to try running through the first act of the new musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" without stopping. As the band struck up an ominous tune that wailed like an ambulance siren, the enormous stage curtain rose to reveal a young woman dangling under a mock-up of the Brooklyn Bridge. Above her appeared a masked man, clad in skin-hugging tights, red and blue and all-American.
We know him, but we may not know him, at least according to the musical's creators. In their eyes, Peter Parker (and his alter ego, Spider-Man) is a character on a spiritual quest to reconcile human frailty with the possibility of greatness. It's an idea that so enraptured the director, Julie Taymor, and the composers, Bono and the Edge, of U2, that they have built a $65 million (and counting) show around him, replete with perspective-skewing scenery and flying sequences that are unprecedented for Broadway.
"Peter Parker is the one," in Ms. Taymor's words, "who shows us how to soar above our petty selves."
If he can soar, that is. Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a "Spider-Man" crew member announced on his mic, "We're gonna hold." It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.
In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life -- to see "Spider-Man" "Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning," said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. "This feels like it."
Yet time is running out.
At the creators' last dinner on Friday night before Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in Australia, Bono said bluntly that the show "won't get out of the gate" and have a chance to catch on with audiences if technical problems persist, as they have in rehearsals.
Still, he and the others did not dwell on mundane matters like flying harnesses. They are all artists who dream big, who compare the show's themes to great literature and philosophy.
"We're wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, 'Wings of Desire,' Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones -- the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you're separate from others," Bono continued. "If the only wows you get from 'Spider-Man' are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we've failed."
Achieving all those wows demands a profound double duty for Ms. Taymor, because many moments of pathos come in scenes where special effects are also in play. Slowly and only recently, she has been unveiling aspects of the show -- both the story line and the effects -- partly to counteract the negative press that has come with an oft-delayed and stratospherically costly production.
"Take the ending of the show," Ms. Taymor explained. "We're going for what will be an intimate moment, but also one that will reflect some of the technical spectacle, and we will need to figure out how to stage that."
Bono murmured, "Figure out how to stage that?" He barked out a series of coughs for comic effect: "Nine days!" He coughed. "First preview!" Cough. "Nine days!"
Ms. Taymor said: "Oh, nice of you to say, Bono, you're out of here in Australia, and we'll be here strapped with this thing. I'm just gonna drink my martini, man."
Bono observed: "The scope of this thing is just hard to grasp sometimes. It just doesn't fit into the normal ---- "
"Broadway mishegoss," Ms. Taymor said.
"Right," Bono said. "And trying to blend comic books -- which is a very American contribution to the world of mythology -- and rock music and Broadway into this thing of art that we don't even have a word for."
For Ms. Taymor, delaying preview performances further -- they were supposed to begin on Nov. 14 -- is not an option. "Delaying just costs too much money, too much money, too much money," she said. The show is scheduled to open on Jan. 11.
Every week's delay eats up to $2 million in lost revenue and, especially, higher expenses for technical rehearsals that require additional crew members. But Ms. Taymor said she hoped that those who bought tickets to preview performances, many of which have been offered at reduced prices, will "get to enjoy the art of making theater, as well as the magic of it."
Ms. Taymor has shielded that magic, as well as most other details of the show, from public view for years now. In recent weeks most attention for the show has dealt with the flying sequences, which New York State safety inspectors have been evaluating (as required by law). That inspection is expected to conclude shortly.
Like the first "Spider-Man" movie, the show begins as an origin story, though Ms. Taymor has reached for Greek mythology in creating a brand-new villainess named Arachne, based on the woman who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena and doomed to spin webs in the shadows for eternity. The introduction of Arachne (Natalie Mendoza) features some of the first breathtaking images, as a giant loom of interwoven silks takes form on the stage, and Arachne descends over the audience on a platform.
As with the human-controlled puppets in her hit musical "The Lion King" and the dreamlike sequences in her movies "Across the Universe" and the forthcoming "Tempest," Ms. Taymor's artistic imagination hatches to life in Arachne.
"What I really wanted to do, and what the 'Spider-Man' movies and comics haven't done, is go to this absolutely fantastical, mythic place that is out of time, somewhere between reality and the dream world," she said.
And where the fits and the starts have occurred. At the Act I run-through, as Ms. Mendoza's Arachne began descending, her spider-legged costume came undone because of a malfunction. Ms. Mendoza was hoisted back aloft; about 20 minutes later, the scene unfolded without incident.
Such moments are the price of striving for a new sort of Broadway production, which was the high bar that the creators set for themselves at their first meeting in the winter of 2002. "We all agreed that there was no point in doing this unless it was new, groundbreaking, something that made it worthwhile for someone to see Spider-Man onstage instead of just getting the DVD for the first film," said the Edge, U2's lead guitarist.
At meetings at their various homes in New York, Los Angeles, Ireland, and France, the four creators began improvising dialogue, lyrics and whole scenes.
Bono, for instance, suggested that they base the character of Norman Osborn, an environmental scientist who becomes the villainous Green Goblin, on Ted Turner, the billionaire entrepreneur whose eccentricities had stayed with Bono after meeting at Mr. Turner's rustic getaway in Georgia. "Bono described this fast-talking, always-thinking, brilliant and strange Southerner, and you're always looking for vivid characters who will pop on the stage," said Glen Berger, who wrote the show's book with Ms. Taymor.
The musical's Osborn/Goblin (Patrick Page) has the gray hair and Southern accent of Mr. Turner and shares his concerns about the environment (hence, here, the "green" angle). "I hope Ted will like it," Bono said.
The Marvel comics became more than a source of storytelling inspiration: they contributed to clever moments in the pop-up design of the production, as when Peter Parker's classroom at a Queens high school unfolds into view. In another sequence, in the side-by-side homes of Peter and his love interest, Mary Jane, the characters in one household freeze like two-dimensional figures in a comic book, while those in the other house interact in a three-dimensional conversation.
"Part of the balance we've been trying to strike is how 'comic book' to go and how 'human' to go," Ms. Taymor said toward the end of dinner. "What helps is that of all the superheroes, Spider-Man is the Everyman. His spiritual and psychological sides give us so much to explore."
After kissing Bono and Edge goodbye as they prepared to depart for Australia, leaving the first performances in her hands, Ms. Taymor looked at the open door that would lead back to the theater.
"Every day," she said, "I just wish there was more time to go even deeper on the story, the acting, the ideas at the heart of the spectacle."