Scary Carrie The Musical: Broadway Magazine Monster Flops Week
By Eric Grundhauser, BROADWAY MAGAZINE - Take a vengeance fueled story about a homicidal teen with pyro-kinetic (that’s magic-fire-making to the lay person) powers, throw in strong anti-religious overtones and splash a bucket of pig’s blood across the finale, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a… hit Broadway musical? That’s certainly what the creators of the 1988 musical version of Stephen King’s novel-turned-movie Carrie thought. But while the story was a wild hit in both prose and film, it hit the Broadway scene like more of a trick than a treat. And as Halloween approaches once again, we take a look back at one of the most terrifying failures in Broadway history.
When Carrie: The Musical began development, problems cropped up almost immediately. Developed from the book by composer Michael Gore and writer Lawrence D. Cohen, who also penned the screenplay for the film version, the production began with numerous rewrites. Though once the script seemed to be smoothed out, enough other aspects of the production came together that the producers announced a Broadway opening set for 1986! Unfortunately, funding for the project was not one of the aspects the possibly overzealous creators had managed to work out, and money for the project wasn’t raised until a year after the announced release date. The show was finally produced in 1988 in Stratford, England for a four-week run. The show was fraught with problems ranging from almost nightly rewrites, to technical problems with the bloody effects and even an entirely rewritten song. Despite the less than stellar reviews from the initial staging, the show was eventually brought to Broadway at the cost of a whopping $8 million. This pricey import would prove to be the show’s mainstream death knell. After a number of previews met with negative reaction, the show lasted only five official performances before the investors pulled their money out of the sinking production gaining the show instant infamy as one of the largest disasters ever to hit Broadway, and simultaneously guaranteeing it a cult following.
Since its cringe-worthy debut Carrie: The Musical has taken on a mythic quality among theater goers in the same vein as other doomed dreams of hubris such as the Titanic or the Hindenburg. This view has become so pervasive that the very mention of the play is often used as shorthand for Broadway projects that seemed destined for failure. The leading book on Broadway flops, Not Since Carrie, is even named after it. Unlike other stage flops Carrie seems to slowly be growing a following in the years since its death. In addition to a growing number of spoofs and campy re-stagings of the piece, the project even has am exhaustive website devoted to it at carriethemusical.com. Whether the play failed because of the writing, the songs, the technical foibles or some arcane combination of all its ill-conceived traits, Carrie: The Musical has certainly managed to excel at gaining infamy. Just don’t tell her that….
Tags: Broadway, Broadway Magazine, Broadway.tv, Carrie The Musical, Lawrence D. Cohen, Michael Gore, Not Since Carrie, Stephen King
