Hey, I'm happy I found this review. I thought all critics panned it on Broadway, but I was surprised to see that Clive Barnes(who lately has been on a mean streak with the new musicals) from The New York Post gave it a great review!
Carrie
12 May - 15 May 1998: Virginia Theatre, NYC, USA
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon (13 February - 5 March 199
MUSICAL 'CARRIE' SOARS ON BLOOD, GUTS AND GORE
New York Post
Clive Barnes
Surprise, Surprise! Terry Hands' blood, sweat and tears staging of Carrie for his Royal Shakespeare Company works.
Part morality play, part melodrama, part grand guignol, part laser show, the one thing that no one can deny about Carrie is that it is definitely a theatrical handful.
When this musical - based on the modern Gothic-style horror novel by Stephen King and its phenomenally successful screen adaptation - opened at the Virginia Theatre last night, few could have known quite what to expect. Apart from the blood.
Scheduled as the last show of the 1987/88 season, a slight postponement for fine-tuning made it, by chance, the first show of the 1988/89 season. This posteponement was merely the last mishap in a concatenation of accidents that has haunted the musical right from its disastrously received and critically trashed English out-of-town opening in Stratofrd-upon-Avon, after which it replaced its star and reworked its entire firmament.
The result of all these switches and changes in a project that seemed, at best, unlikely from the outset, has unexpectedly emerged as a strong, effective and remarkably coherent piece of terrific total theater.
This Carrie unlike the novel or movie, abandons realism for the black and white - plus red for blood - of a schematic morality play, replete with forces of good and evil, to say nothing of a cathartic finale of biblical proportions. Carrie as visualized by Stephen King's novel and Lawrence D. Cohen's original screenplay adaptation, triumphantly combined through-going naturalism - the timeworj familiarity of school-room, suburban home and high school prom - with the shatter-horror of the unknown,a young girl misfit with the gift of telekinesis who brings down the wrath of Beelzebub upon her tormentors.
It was the mixture of the ordinary and extraordinary - right down to that final nightmare hand stretching out from the grave - that gave Carrie its punch.
Cohen, and director Hands, together with composer Michael Gore (of Academy Award-winning Fame fame) and lyricist Dean Pitchford, have approached the story quite differently as a musical.
It concentrates on such set pieces as the gymnasium, where it opens in a piston-powerhouse display of women's calisthenics, gymnastics, acrobatics, and even chorus-line high kicks; the showers; a drive-in; the final prom; while the domestic scenes of Carrie and her insensitively cruel, religious maniac of a mother, Margaret, are played in cube-like stylized settings.
Indeed, all of Ralph Koltai's marvelous high-tech environments, mostly glistening white and moving and slithering around smoothly at the barest hint from the computer, are stylised and depersonalised, as to some extent are Alexander Reid's costumes.
In total effect, Gore's music sounds unmemorable, like movie music seeping into the mind to support the action. Once in a while, helped by Pitchford's unaffected, ungimmicky lyrics, a certain emotionally melodic lyricism is reached, but this is by no means a great score, merely music more than adequate to the purpose.
But this is really Terry Hands' show, and that of his Anglo-American cast. In passing, I note that this is the first time British and American Equities have been able to settle on a totally joint venture - and I not only note this, I beseech all concerned that it not be the last.
Hands' contribution is evident everywhere. As with his earlier RSC musical Poppy - which for some reason never reached Broadway - his directorial method here is both operatic and essentially fluid.
It has a kind of spartan epic directness that rushes to the heart of any dramatic action and stresses the momentum of each and every moment, often with the dazzling chiaroscuro of his own intensely dramatic yet usually simple lighting design.
This relentless directorial push finds another partner here in Debbie Allen's choreography which, while not unduly imaginative apart from the occasional imitative flash of Bob Fosse, is wonderfully dense and energized in texture.
And, of course, there are the special effects, which here are unusually special and effective, including great lasers, a grand collapsing finale with a quietly magisterial epilogue and some nice telekinetic tricks.
And the collaborators - not least Hands - have had the good sense to realize the mythic possibilities of this original King-size story.
Cohen's book beautifully spotlights the crucial scenes of Carrie's chilling progress to mass destruction, and Hands and Allen let the cast have their way with the larger-than-death legendary story.
As the good girl and bad girl respectively, a conscience-stricken Sally Ann Triplett and a glitteringly venomous Charlotte d'Amboise are simplistically superb, while Darlene Love sings handsomely as the sympathetic teacher who wants to help Carrie.
But the two performances that must support the entire structure of Carrie are Betty Buckley's as Carrie's mother, Margaret, and Linzi Hateley's as Carrie herself.
Buckley, with her vinegar and molasses voice, is superbly dramatic as the mother, from her first tortured entrance to her final tragic gesture.
As for young Hateley, and English teenager suddenly projected to Broadway stardom, she has just the right gaucheness, that lumpen, clodlike outsider quality as well as the spark of Cinderella radiance, and while she might miss the full strange force of Sissy Spacek in the movie, she sings with childlike innocence like a fallen angel.
