CARRIE to Hold Developmental Lab, May 25–June 7

That's nice. There's always something really cute in hearing about people exerting so much quixotic and doomed effort to turn an awful show into a not-awful show. Or maybe this is primarily being done simply to give everyone a (revised) glimpse of the awfulness they missed 23 years ago.

Good luck to them, even though their time might be better spent writing something new, using the lessons the learned (or didn't) from this fiasco.

I wonder has there ever been a total bomb musical that came back and was successful? Anyone know?

GRAND HOTEL would be the closest example of a 'bomb' that came back a hit. The show began life as AT THE GRAND which closed out of town with Paul Muni in 1958.

Tommy Tune of course made it a Broadway hit some thirty years later, but only after an exhaustive out of town tryout in which he brought on Kopit and Yeston to augment the original Wright/Forrest score and cut most of the original script making it a triumph of staging and concept.

I saw the first Broadway preview of the original production and was an early contributor to the discussions that have become the received collective wisdom about the show through the years: "the mother/daughter scenes were great!", "the teen scenes, oy!", "the sets and costumes? dreadful!", "but the mother/daughter scenes were great!", "Debbie Allen, wtf?". "WTF" was originally coined as a result of her work on the show.

The thing is, they mother/daughter scenes were "grea"t in comparison to everything else about the show, not the production, but the show. Compared to something actually good, they weren't so great at all. You have to grade the show on a curve to arrive at the idea that there was anything worth saving. Anything you try to do after that is pure delusion.

No matter what songanddanceman2 tells you.

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And it takes a very specific persona and skills set to give Margaret White the it factor, they could possibly only be found in one actress.

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Oh, and -- one of my big regrets at not being allowed to revive the show in the 90's was not being able to use the ad that I pitched them:

CARRIE WHITE BURNS IN HELL
Nightly. At The Las Palmas Theatre.

Yes, Namo. It was.

People want to see the campy Carrie, from 1988. Not a reworked version that will probably never be good. Flying mirrors and disco balls.

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So just taking the staging from "I'm Not Alone" and using it earlier in the show during the title song was all it would have taken to fix the show?

One of the numerous problems with the original production was that there was no natural progression of Carrie's discovery of her powers, and no explanation of just what her powers were (telekineses is never once mentioned anywhere in the show, leaving people unfamiliar with either the book or the movie scratching their heads). Her using her power, which is largely fueled by her inner struggles, stress, and lack of any true positive emotional outlet to create a cheap, second-rate, black light magic show just showed how little understanding of the source material there really was.

That's true for the original 88 production. They tried to present a serious musical, which obviously didn't work. Since then, however, it became a cult musical and has a big following in the theater community. I doubt people really want to see a "good" production of Carrie. They just want to relive the campy production everyone wishes they had caught in the 80s. People's expectations from this material are now very different from what they were back then.

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Updated On: 4/22/11 at 03:29 PM

Well, that's probably part of the reason they're trying it out in a tiny off-broadway house first.

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You seem very specific in your idea of what it was people wanted to see, but then got more general when I asked you to explain. Your specific description of laundry and dreaming of the prom was what you said was what people wanted to see.

I'll tell you what it was like before the first preview in NYC. There were posters with that most incredible original Carrie artwork EVERYWHERE you looked in Times Square with the tagline "There's never been a musical like her." We were visiting NYC that week and when we saw the poster for the first time we sort of chuckled because the idea seemed so preposterous. As our visit went on, we happened to go by the theater as the giant disco ball was being loaded in. We had been bombared with that poster for days. Suddenly, we were sorry that we were leaving town the day before the first performance.

There was something about seeing a physical piece of the set being loaded in that got our curiosity up. I remember saying, "Maybe they're actually going to make something out of it." We extended our visit and bought tickets, full price!! 10th row center!

I had never read the King novella and thought the movie was a cheaply made piece of exploitation cinema with a couple of good scares, which just happened to luck out because Vinny Barbarino had become HUGE between the making of the movie and its release. So I didn't go to it with cherished memories of any beloved source material. I just wanted to see what they would make out of it. Would there be a good shock jump out of the seat moment? How would they render something that mostly made audiences laugh in the movie theater, realistically?

As luck would have it, they didn't. And what started out as most of us saying, "It really wasn't ALL bad" has over the years morphed into "There were parts that were excellent and all they have to do is CHANGE EVERYTHING so it will be a good show!"

I think producers swayed by this would be investing in Fool's Gold.

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