"Revisiting Carrie" One Night Only — Page 2

I want to see!!!

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I find it harder to see Ranson in her role than Mazzie...as a post mentions on ATC it would be interesting to see how she can handle the role 8 times a week because she doesn't really appear to have a big voice and because she is such a small presence and didn't show much personality I'm not sure whether she will command the stage and be sympathetic- if that is important.

Meanwhile, Mazzie is a powerhouse and a presence, clearly she can handle the vulnerable moments of the show, so I assume that your reservations are whether she can be ruthless and scary. She wasn't particularly ruthless calling Carrie a 'fool' in the Carrie (reprise) Dialogue, but I think she can do it - I imagine vocally her "Eve was Weak" will take cues from her "You Don't Know", if she screeched "And Eve was weak - AND EVE WAS WEAK" over the top of Carrie's lines like when she spoke-screeched "You Don't Know" in N2N I think that could be thrilling.

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I'm listening to "In" from the 2009 reading and although it is closer to what they performed last night than to the original it still sounds like they have still changed it quite a bit. Would like to 'hear' it again if anyone can PM :P?

Also, did you notice the structure for the title song has changed a little bit? E.g. In the original and 2009 reading after Carrie sings "I wish they'd stop" there is an abrupt change and she sings softly etc.., when last night she kept singing and this shift comes later in the song. Maybe they truncated it for last night only, I can't tell (it didn't feel particularly shorter to me, though). But I liked how they used to do it.

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Updated On: 8/2/11 at 12:18 PM

Im dying to see if they kept many of the songs from the 2009 reading it, seemed to be on the right track. Ws in different to the 2009 reading?

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Im just listening to the reading again now, Mazzie is actually much better than i remember, her Eve Was Weak is brilliant.
Im sure Molly will act the role very well, i just hope her voice will match.
Im fully confident they will pull this off, Stafford is a smasrt director so its in very good hands.

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Really really disappointed in Mazzie last night. My friend who was not familiar with her work at all, was more disappointed than me. Loved "In". Just a side note, would it kill the Lortel management to turn the AC onmore than ten minutes before a sold out audience arrives, it was hot as Hell in there.

Once Ranson gets comfortable with a song, she can blow the roof off a theatre. She has a much bigger voice than what I heard from the reading would lead one to believe.

From what I've heard of Mazzie, she's quite the singing actress as opposed to an acting singer. I'm looking forward to actually seeing her in the role because I wasn't sold after hearing the 2009 reading. I wish they would have done this five years ago with Ripley as Margaret, that would have been breathtaking to hear her sing the score before Next to Normal.

All of that being said, I'd love to get my hands on some of that audio from last night... hm...

Well there was a difference between the 2009 reading and the other night. First, they were working nonstop for 29 hours. They were probably exhausted. And second there is a difference from performing at a table at a simple reading and standing on a stage in front of a public audience and actually giving a performance. Trust me, she has improved amazingly. She had a year and a half to learn the new material since the 2009 reading when she only had 3 days.

I thought Mazzie nailed it in 2009 and wasn't surprised that she got first refusal after the reading. If you go in expecting Betty Buckley belting to the rafters you're going to be disappointed. But I'm confident that Mazzie will give a spectacular performance in the full production.

I'm still not sold on Ranson, especially after seeing her in JERUSALEM--and I mean "seeing her" quite literally, since I didn't hear a word she heard all night. And I was in prime center orchestra. She seems the kind of presence who fades while still in plain view on stage.

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Of course the blame goes on him, it was his concept and he was in charge of the show. The blame for Carrie falls to the man at the head of the table and that was Hands. And whilst Allen's choreography was over done (though often impressive) she was really the only one on the team who seemed to have a clear vision of what she wanted. Sadly her vision did not match Hands and he let her take over.

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It's reductive to blame Hands and Hands alone - much of the book and score were simply laughably bad. Gore and Pitchford just don't have the talent/skill to write a good show. If they did, they would have by now, they're both over 60, for cripe's sake. It's not like they're young BMI students, still learning the craft.

Pitchford and Gore have written a few pop songs that achieved a bit of success, but are in no way top-tier pop writers (Mann and Weill, Greenwich and Barry, even Lieber and Stoller are bigger than them). You can't call them nobodies, but they certainly aren't A-list; and when it comes to writing songs that are more than stand-alone simple ditties, that achieve the level of dramatic quality to which they aspire, they just don't have what it takes.

Of course there's an enormous level of subjectivity when discussing the appeal of music/lyrics - some people think that the nursery-song simplicity of Andrew Lloyd Weber is equal in complexity and richness to Ravel, and no amount of learning or expert testimony will convince them otherwise. So when I say that the score to Carrie is silly and incompetent, I'm definitely not trying to convince you that you're wrong, if you disagree.

Oh, I don't think I'm missing the point - no director, no matter how great, can get good writing from bad writers. You'll never get "A la recherch du temps perdu" from Jackie Collins.

And yes, I've heard that opinion about how great "And Eve Was Weak" and the other Margaret/Carrie stuff is - I've played through the score over and over, and I find it's all dreck; it's just that some of the dreck is less obviously dreckich. Still - all the music is beginner-level, and none of the lyrics are better than awkward.

But note that I maintain the caveat that these things are ruled by subjectivity - although there are certain technical standards to composing and poetry, very few people seem to care about them much, relying instead upon "gut reaction" (or "heart reaction," if you prefer).