Revelling in the tangled web of chaotic Spider-Man musical

This summer, out of the blue, playwright Glen Berger got a call from director Julie Taymor. He assumed he was being butt-dialled. "I thought, 'Oh, wow. She sat on her phone. How weird,'" he recalls.

After all, the two hadn't spoken for more than two years following a bitter falling-out during the rocky launch of Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Taymor had been fired and a flurry of lawsuits began. So Berger let the call go to voicemail and was surprised when Taymor left a message asking him to call her back. He was tempted - she was a special person, after all - but he knew he had to be careful.

This was how bad it had become: Berger called his agent first, who insisted Berger's lawyer be consulted. The lawyer called back 10 minutes later - don't call the Tony Award winner back, he was warned. "He said, 'For Glen, Julie's a siren. He'll do anything she wants'."

It turned out the advice was pointless. Taymor called Berger again on a blocked number and he picked up. "The first thing out of her mouth was, 'All right, so, am I going to have to worry about this book?'"

The book is Berger's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History, the playwright's attempt to make sense of a US$75 million spectacle with music by Bono and The Edge that took six years of his life and turned his work into a punch line.

It's a fun read, a modern-day Heart of Darkness in which Berger - a mild-mannered writer for children's TV and a playwright whose biggest hit was Underneath the Lintel - describes getting caught in the web of dysfunctionality, back-stabbing and out-of-control egos.