Carrie
Something Old
Happy Halloween, everyone! As a gigantic dork and Certified Queer, I’m contractually obligated to love Halloween, but it’s also objectively a great holiday. No I will not be leaving my apartment, but nothing can keep me from the Halloween spirit. With that in mind, today we’re talking about Broadway’s most iconic flop: Carrie.
Stephen King’s 1974 novel was first adapted into a 1976 film. It follows a bullied high school student with an abusive religious fanatic mother, and the development of the teen’s telekinetic powers that lead to destruction when her bullies cover her in blood at the prom. Carrie was actually King’s first published novel and his first book adapted to film, and both are widely regarded as exceptional horror entries in their respective mediums. There are also, for some reason, a handful of other films in the “Carrie film franchise,” none of which are widely regarded as anything except unnecessary.
Enter Carrie the musical.
Lawrence Cohen, who wrote the script for the 1976 film, started working on a musical adaptation in the early 1980s. He collaborated with composer Michael Gore, who also brought in Dean Pitchford to help with the various rewrites. They held their first workshop in August 1984, and quickly announced that Carrie would reach Broadway in 1986. It… didn’t.
Wildly enough, the first major production was in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in February 1988. It was part of a season of American shows, but that still feels like a bizarre choice. The show was huge and technically ambitious, with lots of massive moving scenery and pyrotechnics. As complicated sets are wont to do, it had frequent problems. My favorite bug is that they couldn’t dump the “blood” onto the actress playing Carrie without shorting out her microphone.
They also were constantly rewriting parts of the show and changing out songs, which is fair enough for a first production, except for they didn’t always keep the programs up to date with their changes. The real problems, however, were the safety issues—Barbara Cook, who was playing Carrie’s mother, was almost decapitated on opening night. She resigned, but agreed to stay on until they cast a replacement. Cook ended up having to stay through the entire four-week run. She ran the hell away from Carrie the second the Stratford run was over.
Despite mixed-to-poor reviews, Carrie raised enough money to transfer to Broadway. It cost $8 million, which may look quaint next to Spider-Man’s $75 million, but at the time was an absurd amount of money for a Broadway show. The UK cast all stayed except for Betty Buckley coming on to replace Cook. Buckley had actually played a different character in the film, which is fun.
Previews started on April 28, 1988. Actors recalled being shocked to hear boos mixed in with the cheers. Years later, actor Charlotte d'Amboise (who played the main bully) reflected on the audience reaction and her take of the show: “it just was clunky, like you’d suddenly have this scene where a mother’s abusing her child, and it’s an incredible scene, and then they would pop up and it would be Fame, or Grease. The audience had no moment to adjust, and so then you start laughing at it, ‘cause it seems ridiculous.” But she also saw that people truly resonated with some parts of the musical. “There was brilliance in the show. There was stuff that didn’t work, and it didn’t work together, but there were moments of brilliance.”
Indeed, when the lead actresses Linzi Hateley and Buckley came out for their bows, the entire theater jumped into a standing ovation. Propelled by love for the source material and the leads, the show was sold out all weekend. However, after a slew of scathing reviews the backers got spooked and pulled their money. Carrie closed on May 15 after 16 previews and 5 performances, making it one of the most expensive flops of all time. In the aftermath, the creators looked around and noticed that virtually everyone involved had little or no Broadway experience. They noted that may have been part of the problem.
Instead of fading into obscurity, Carrie continued to stay around in the hearts of musical theater nerds. A weird little horror/sci-fi musical will do that. The creators saw enough potential with the material to take another stab at it in 2009, hosting a reading after revisions by the original team. In March 2012, an official Carrie revival opened Off-Broadway at MCC. While they only had a five-week limited run, it was nominated for several awards and got a cast recording for the first time. The cast recording cemented the Off-Broadway production as the definitive version for most fans coming to the show, and gave it a place in the public consciousness beyond “Broadway’s biggest flop.”
In 2015, Carrie took the biggest step yet: an immersive experience in Los Angeles at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.
I was lukewarm on Carrie when I started researching this, but I would ABSOLUTELY go see this site-specific version. Director Brady Schwind had a vision to transform Carrie into the larger-than-life horror experience he thought it always should be. While the Off-Broadway version toned down the supernatural elements and focused on the bullying plotline, Schwind wanted it to be “a horror piece and a visceral piece, and the audience wants to feel frightened. They want blood. They want it to be an overloaded sensory experience, because that's closer to the feeling that we all have in high school. I wanted this to be a Greek tragedy and a horror story and entertaining and fun. You should root for Carrie till she kills you." The writing team got on board and they updated it once again to play up to the strengths of an immersive theater experience.
La Mirada Theater was transformed into Ewen High School, with the audience in seating units that move throughout the show. Attendees could even choose to get up and be part of the prom itself, presumably in the blood splash zone. Schwind said they went through so much fake blood each night they “had a blood sponsor” to afford it. Apparently modern innovation figured out how to achieve the gory effect without ruining the audio tech or costumes. The production received good reviews (finally!) and had two different runs in Los Angeles in 2015.
Decades after Carrie flopped so hard it inspired the title of an entire book about Broadway failures, it’s finally found its place. While it remains a relatively niche cult hit, it did receive the ultimate honor in 2018: it was the subject of Riverdale’s first ever musical episode. I love happy endings.
Something New
They released the trailer for The Prom, and I have mixed feelings about it. I don’t love how the original Broadway cast got treated in this process, I don’t like that Barry is being played by a straight man, and I really don’t like that the preview is all about the A-List actors and not about the lesbians at the heart of the story. However, I’m grateful for this pulling more viewers to an original musical movie and I still have hope that the actual movie will be more about Emma and Alyssa than the trailer suggests. Also, to be honest, I am so starved for musical theater at this point that I will probably watch this three times in a row regardless of ultimate quality.
Something Borrowed
It is vitally important to me that you watch the Riverdale version of Carrie’s opening number, featuring Archie doing push-ups while reading the script for some reason.
Something Blue
Kerri Kearse is part of the Playbill social media team and is unbelievably smart, funny, and knowledgeable about theater (and Shakira).
Epilogue
Thanks so much for reading! This is the last issue of Getting Married Today for a little while. I hope you enjoyed this pilot run, and I’ll see you again in 2021.