TAYMOR: Yes-when dialogue isn’t enough. When an exterior relationship between characters is not expressing what’s going on inside.

MOLINA: It’s the soliloquy.

TAYMOR: Yes, exactly. That’s why this was very interesting in this proposition of doing Spider-Man. Everybody knows and loves that Spider-Man is an action figure. A little girl called this action theater, which I thought was pretty cool. We’ve been calling it circus rock ‘n’ roll drama, but I love this notion also of action theater. In that action mode, we have the lead actor fly quite often on it; he does his own flights. But that’s when he’s unmasked. When he’s masked, it’s going to be a dancer flying through the air. We have 10 of them that take on that action movement of lifting off over the heads of the audience to do his savior role. But he’s not going to sing in that mode. The Peter Parker that you were talking about earlier is the troubled teenager who is funny, he’s self-deprecating, he’s full of quips, he’s really frustrated with his life… In the second act, we have the sort of rise of Spider-Man, the fall of Peter Parker. He is tormented by trying to be the hero and at the same time have a regular life, so he has a lot to sing about. But this gives us material, fodder for songs.

MOLINA: Did you go to Bono and Edge, or was it the other way around?

TAYMOR: No, it was the other way around. Tony Adams, who was the original producer, called me up and asked me if I would be interested in doing this project with Bono and Edge, and that was an exciting proposition. It felt like a rock musical, and the right sensibility for something that is a teenage story, a comic book being brought to life on stage, with mostly rock songs. They’ve done an amazing job of also doing songs for characters like Dr. Osborn or the Green Goblin, and this figure of Arachne, who is the origin of the origins, the original Spider-Woman, who figures very strongly especially in Act 2. They have voices for Mary Jane. They actually have found their inner girl, I think.

MOLINA: The huge technology that is involved now in a show like Spider-Man, the computerized wiring and all that stuff… When I did Spider-Man 2 [2004], the movie-

TAYMOR: You figure a little bit in this.

MOLINA: Oh, good. Because I had never done anything like that before, and I found myself completely fascinated by this equation that the actors had to solve between all the things that we are concerned with-character, the emotional life of the character, and so on and so forth-with all the technological requirements. Having to somehow marry these two seemingly paradoxical states.

TAYMOR: What I adore is the juxtaposition of high tech and low tech. It’s sort of like I love the sacred and the profane. I love to put these extremes in the same hopper. When you see these guys fly in Spider-Man-of course there are computers; there’s no way you could do it without them-what they are actually doing requires incredible physical skill and rehearsal. But when we stop… That’s why we call it a circus, because sometimes, if their balance isn’t exactly right on the pendulum swing, they won’t land properly. It’s not like they are computerized. It’s just the movement of what we call the bushing, the things above. Spider-Man doesn’t fly without threads anyway, so the revealing of the strings was also a big part of it, just like in The Lion King you see the strings and the rods-it’s apparent. That’s enjoyable, that you see how it’s done. That is the low-tech aspect, and it gives the actors a tremendous sense of their character. For instance, when Peter gets his powers and he starts on the ceiling of his bedroom, he is literally attached to the ceiling of a red room with four walls, and we have a song called “Bouncing Off The Walls.” He’s on his wires, but he literally leaps and bounces from wall to ceiling to bed to back wall, and does these spins, and as the actor is singing this, he is doing what he’s talking about. He is literally bouncing and the walls come apart. It’s highly theatrical. The walls are held by human beings. They don’t always do it the same way. In that sense, it is true circus. It changes every night. Sometimes it’s better than another night.