Word was out. Carrie: The Musical was in previews and was the hottest ticket in town. Unfortunately, it was for all the wrong reasons. Audiences were aghast. Some loved it, some hated it. Boos, jeers, cheers, and standing ovations occurred simultaneously.
The staging was abstract, the choreography overwrought, the songs were sometimes brilliant, sometimes deeply lacking. It was confusing for anyone unfamiliar with Stephen King’s novel or the Brian DePalma film, unrelatable to most people who had ever experienced high school, and the material was a confounding candidate to musicalize. To its fans, it was campy (in the positive sense) and undeniably entertaining in the way Ed Wood movies and midnight showings of Reefer Madness are.
For those on both ends of the love/hate spectrum, it was without a doubt a show that was simply unbelievable.
The staging, inspired by Greek tragedy, began with a Physical Education class with students in white leotards and togas, followed by a locker room scene with suspended panels apparently standing in for showers. At the end of the first act, the first hint of Carrie’s telekinetic powers appears out of nowhere as she, hands apparently aflame, pins her mother behind a wall of fire. The prom sequence culminates with Billy pouring a small bucket of red liquid over Carrie’s head. She is then lifted into the air on a white hydraulic platform and “laser beams shoot out over the audience,” according to writer Ken Mandelbaum, before the roof descends, apparently crushing all but Carrie.
The show ends with a massive white staircase that Margaret White descends—in a cocktail dress. She then pulls out a knife and stabs Carrie, who touches her mother, causing her to suddenly drop dead.
The producers hoped for good reviews. They did not get them. They hoped a young, MTV-oriented audience would find the show. They didn’t. Carrie was a fiasco, and there was no saving it. “It was the most expensive flop in Broadway history,” Mandelbaum wrote, “losing the $8 million which had been contributed by British and West German investors.” The history of Carrie involves several major players, almost all of them with a great deal of success and experience going for them. So, the question is, how did it all go so wrong?
Why Carrie Seemed Like the Perfect Musical
The long road of Carrie: The Musical began with writer Lawrence D. Cohen, who had written the screenplay for the very successful film adaptation directed by Brian DePalma, and his partner Michael Gore, best known for his work on the music for the film Fame (1980). Soon after the success of Fame, the two were looking for a project to make into a stage musical. The two attended a performance of Lulu, an opera that originally premiered in 1937 shortly after the death of its composer, Alban Berg. The unusual and complicated story involves a woman who is ultimately murdered by Jack the Ripper and is scored with the atonal music that Berg was known for.
Upon leaving the theater, Gore said, “If Alban Berg were alive, he’d probably do Carrie as a musical.” At first the two laughed at the thought, but the idea stuck with them. Cohen began to realize that the relationship between Carrie and her mother Margaret White was quite theatrical, even operatic. The other element, the high school setting, was a natural fit and had been wildly successful in stage and film musicals including West Side Story, Grease, and of course Fame.
Also, horror musicals were not unprecedented. The Rocky Horror Picture Show had been a massive underground stage hit in London, and the movie was becoming a phenomenon by the early 80s. Little Shop of Horrors was about to open off-Broadway to great success. Just a couple of years earlier, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street had not only been a huge hit but had won the Tony for Best Musical.
So, Cohen and Gore contacted Stephen King, who responded, “If they can make a musical out of the dictator of Argentina [Evita], why not?” The two set to work right away, Cohen on the book and Gore on the songs. They soon added a third collaborator, Dean Pitchford, who had also worked on some of the music for Fame and had written the screenplay for the film Footloose (1984).
In August of 1984, they mounted a workshop production of the first act to drum up interest in the project. In this version, the show stuck to the grounded nature of both King’s novel and the DePalma film. It was a story of teenagers, a mother and daughter, and high school rivalries in a real-world setting with a supernatural element added to stir the pot and raise the stakes. This version maintained much of the dialogue that Cohen had included in his screenplay, with the songs forwarding the story and underlining the themes.
The workshop was well received, and it was soon announced that Carrie: The Musical would open on Broadway in the fall of 1986 and be produced by Barry and Fran Weissler and Fred Zollo. Cohen spoke highly of these creatively invigorating early years, saying, “We all had a lot of fun writing it and bringing it to life.” Unfortunately, this version of Carrie was not to be, as the finances could not be raised for it.
When Carrie Lost Its Way
A few years after this version of the project fell through, West German producer Friedrich Kurz took up Carrie and arranged for it to be produced with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which had been looking for another musical property after its success with Les Misérables. The artistic director of the RSC, Terry Hands, expressed great interest in the project and was attached as director. Cohen later expressed that this moment ended up sealing the fate of Carrie. Years before, the attachment of Brian DePalma did something similar for the movie, leading to its success. Unfortunately, the attachment of Hands turned out to be “far less felicitous,” to use Cohen’s rather diplomatic phrasing.
Hands’ attachment to the project was not without warrant. He had directed a complicated musical, Poppy, for the RSC to some success, including winning Best Musical from the Society of West End Theaters. Cohen believes that the problem had more to do with Carrie being a uniquely American piece. Being British, the high school politics and the prom setting were aspects that Hands did not seem to fully grasp, and he opted for a sparse, abstract reworking of the material. He also cut much of the dialogue, transforming Carrie from a musical play to a through-sung, borderline operetta, more like Les Misérables.
Carrie: The Musical played for a three-week engagement in Stratford upon Avon in the winter of 1988, and the reviews were dreadful. Many of the British critics were incensed that government funds were being used by the RSC for “a Broadway tryout.” Barbara Cook, who played Margaret White in this production, thought the whole idea of musicalizing Carrie was bizarre, but took the role after hearing some of the music. “I was still wary of it because of the subject matter. But Terry’s vision of the material intrigued me.”
Unfortunately, she also found much of the production inept and expressed that no one seemed to know how to fix it. Because of all this and a mishap with the set on opening night that nearly decapitated her, Cook left the production after the Stratford run.
The Broadway Run That Became Legend
The show then moved to Broadway for the fateful final nail in its coffin, with a score reorchestrated by Harold Wheeler, who had also worked on Dreamgirls. In a twist of fate, Betty Buckley, who had starred as the gym teacher Miss Collins in the 1976 film, was cast as Margaret White. The production ran for 21 previews and 5 performances, ironically to mostly sold-out crowds, at the Virginia Theater. The reviews were even worse than they had been in England. The New York Times eviscerated the show, as did most critics, with the exception of Clive Barnes of the New York Post, who gave it a full-throated rave.
Audience reactions were varied to the point of schizophrenia. Buckley described the reception at their first preview on April 28, 1988. At the end of the performance, “it’s a blackout, and the whole audience in the whole place starts to boo.” It was an experience she had never had before, but she urged her costar, the young Linzie Hateley, to continue as planned to the bows. When the lights came up, the entire audience turned on a dime from boos to a house-wide standing ovation. This seems to have been the reception throughout the run. Tickets for the previews became the hottest ticket in town as Carrie: The Musical had to be seen to be believed.
The ultimate demise of the show came down to one thing. According to Cohen, “bottom line…there was no money. The producer had run through it all and fled in the middle of the night, and we were done.” Carrie would soon enter the annals of the most legendary of all Broadway flops and become a cautionary tale for all who sought to bring unconventional subject matter to the musical stage. It even provided the title for Ken Mandelbaum’s chronicle of the most notorious failures in Broadway history: Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops.
So, imagine my surprise when, thirty years after this monumental failure, I got a call from the musical director for the theater department at a large local college asking if I would like to play guitar for their production of Carrie: The Musical. As I remember it, I audibly guffawed. But as it turns out, a lot had happened with Carrie in the last thirty years.
The Musical’s Unexpected Resurrection
After the demise of Carrie on Broadway, Cohen, Gore, and Pitchford went on to other things. Still, they all felt there was a good show somewhere in the rubble. They received multiple requests over the years to restage the show but did not take up any of the offers because they felt the writing itself, both book and music, could be better. According to Cohen:
“So, it took about two decades, and the three of us went back to work on it thinking that there were a lot of high schools, colleges, and regional theaters that would probably want to do Carrie…we pulled it apart from top to bottom and rewrote 60-70 percent of the show.”
From my experience with this reworked version, it also appears that they very much returned to the spirit of the workshop version. It is once again a musical play rather than an operetta-like show. The sets are grounded in reality, the situations reflect the struggles of relatable teenagers, and the interaction between Carrie and Margaret is complex and moving. In addition, the supernatural element is organic and believable to the world of the story and introduced slowly throughout the first act, as in the novel and film.
After the revision, Carrie went on to an off-Broadway production, which ran significantly longer than its Broadway counterpart, and spawned a very successful cast album. Since this run, it has been revised further, honing it into one of the most popular shows for high school, college, and regional theater productions of recent memory. Eventually, award-winning stagings were mounted in Los Angeles and London, where it won Best Off-West End Production, on top of selling out night after night.
The show as it now exists is beautifully written both in script and songs, funny, relatable, and even quite moving. During my own experience with Carrie, the ending never failed to bring tears to my eyes. Reflecting on the whole experience, Cohen referred to the iconic ending of the DePalma film. “Sort of like Carrie’s hand from the grave, it’s had a real happy ending. A real resurrection which is great.”
Few musicals have ever received such a second life. Its ultimate success is a testament to the power of the story and the vision of its creators, who pressed on against all odds to make their version of Carrie the best it could possibly be. That tenacity is not unlike the character of Carrie herself, who continues to return again and again, shocking us with a bloody hand reaching up out of the rubble.
