Spider-Man Musical Co-Author Glen Berger Reveals Details on Busy Broadway Preview Period

As the long-awaited musical Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark begins performances, Broadway.com caught up with the show’s co-book writer, Glen Berger, for some scoop on what’s happening inside the Foxwoods Theatre. “It’s going fantastic,” Berger said. “We were thrilled after the first show. We could see everything this show is going to be once we get everything ironed out.”

The technical difficulties experienced during the musical’s first preview on November 28 became highly publicized, but Berger doesn’t feel the production is in trouble. “I know people think, ‘Oh, there’s all these delays,' but in the end [this process] hasn’t taken that long. It took [co-book author and director Julie Taymor and I] two and half years to write this script, direct the treatment, get it approved [by Marvel Comics], get all the music written and then have a first reading. Given all the technical challenges we had to figure out, having this entire thing up and running three years later doesn’t feel long to me.”

Berger, whose previous plays include Underneath the Lintel and Max and The Wooden Breeks, is used to pressure in the workplace. “I have never not worked on a show that hasn’t required high anxiety," he said with a laugh. "Everything is turned up to 11 with Spider-Man, but every other show I’ve done people always said ‘Oh this is the hardest job I’ve ever done’, so this feels like a comfortable place to be."

Despite the need to tighten technical kinks, Berger doesn’t expect Turn Off the Dark to change much before its January 11, 2011, opening night. “When you finally get the show up on its feet, it does become clear what things need to be clarified, made more serious or more amusing. There’ll be plenty of tweaks, but nothing vast from what we can see.”

So, is Berger afraid of having to please die-hard fans of the long-running comic? “They’re just incredibly passionate, but you can’t be concerned with that sort of stuff,” he said. “They see themselves as the guardians of something sacred, and we are coming at it with the same respect. We wrote this story to try to please not just them, but also the eight-year-old who’s also obsessed with Spider-Man in a totally different way plus plenty of other folks. The show truly is everything we hoped it would be.”