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DANIEL EZZRALOW: It became clear after working with Julie
on Across the Universe, we really were of like minds in
terms of how we saw movement, how we approached it.
And she said, OK, let's do this.
And when we talked, we said look, Spiderman, he swings
he's in the air, he climbs walls.
And we both knew that we had to go to the next level of it.
We started brainstorming-- it must been four years ago.
We started really brainstorming-- what do we
want to do?
How do we want to do it?
There was a song called "Bouncing Off the Walls." How
do we get him bouncing off the walls?
Do we put him in a huge mechanical arm
that swings him around?
Or do we put him on a twisty belt?
But it's gotten much more sophisticated from the early
days of Foy, when someone hooked you up and Peter Pan
would go, err-err-err, pick you up and slide you across.
I had been working with Cirque on Love in Vegas.
And I had started to see really
sophisticated flying systems.
And we said we had to put a team together.
And what we really did is put a team together of a designer,
Scott Rogers, and a kind of a rigging
designer, Jaque Paquin.
And from that, Scott came from the world of
the Spiderman films.
He was the stunt coordinator on Spidey 2 and 3.
And he really understood wire work and the high speed motors
and the programming of it and the design of it.
And Jaque really understood rigging.
He's been Cirque's rigger for 20 years.
We did a workshop early on, probably 3 and 1/2 years ago,
in Sony Studios in LA.
Which we did about four weeks, 3 and 1/2 weeks of where we
really started to define what the outer parameters of this
kind of flying was going to be.
And I realized that really, the way that Cirque was doing
it, the way that Scott Rogers does it in the movies,
was the way to go.
And so we came together and designed a system which is
really a fully
three-dimensional, automated system.
It is for sure, the most sophisticated thing that's
ever been done on Broadway.
And on some levels, it's the most sophisticated flying
because it's two people interacting in the air in
three dimensional space.
I would say it's very much the first of its kind.
I think, I imagine, people will follow.
It really is technical.
When these wires take you, they take you.
And what you have to learn is to give into the wires and
learn how to flow with the wires.
It's really driven by narrative.
It really is.
When you're working in theater, even Broadway to a
sense, I don't want to do a number that stops the show and
wow, and everyone will clap.
They love what they're doing, but it's got be interwoven.
I've said many times, and I hate saying it--
I hate saying it, so qualify that, put
that with this comment--
I almost don't want you to think there's a choreographer.
Because in the best sense, you don't want movement to sound
like whoa, that's my work, ah, there's a couple steps.
You want to be all cohesive.
You want the actors to move like that's the
way they would move.
Spiderman was written in the '60s.
There's a very different time.
We couldn't do a Mad Men in Spiderman, so we had to take
what's on the streets today.
In the process of auditioning, I was very conscious of who I
was choosing.
I mean there were fabulous technicians that came that I
had to say no to because I could see they didn't want to
go the physical nature.
And then there were other people that were physical but
didn't have enough of the technique to move fast enough.
It was an arduous process.
I tested them in strength, I tested them in style, I tested
them in technique.
We got them in the air and flew them.
It was almost like a little bit of a strange boot camp
audition, that I had to see is this the right person?
Then I interviewed everyone.
Ultimately my process, even with the greatest dancer,
won't be anything if we don't have a simpatico.
I mean, I liked "Bullying By Numbers" because we had all
the guys, and we were playing like crazy with new moves and
inventing things.
Although I like the women in "Deeply Furious" because they
all have six legs on.
It was funny, we got in the room with all the women and
I'm a guy, so I don't know.
I sat there with the women and I realized, I didn't really
have a straight line to talk to them about this piece.
Because I realized it was going to be hard for me to
show seven women how to sort of become deeply furious, both
sensually and also physically with these legs.
What's I think amazing about Spiderman is that it's a lot
of very talented people.
These are people that are the top of their game.
And we're all working together.
And I love that because I think we're in a collaborative
nature where there's no ego involved.
We're all trying to make Spiderman.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Tickets for Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark
are available through Ticketmaster or at the Foxwood
Theater Box Office on 42nd Street.