"Carrie" the Musical: The Broadway Show That Closed in Three Days ("Wait in the Wings," 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie I ran my husband Charles an hour-long documentary on the making of the 1988 musical Carrie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTaAzFl_GYk), one of the most notable flops in Broadway history. As all the world knows, Carrie began life as a 1971 novel by the then little-known Stephen King. who wrote the first draft in a few weeks and originally threw it out until his wife Tabitha fished it out of their trash, read it, and told him she loved it and thought it had commercial potential. Accordingly King finished the novel and sent it to Doubleday, thinking they’d offer to publish it as a paperback original. Instead they actually paid $400,000 for the hardcover rights and this enabled King and his wife to quit their precarious existences (he was an English teacher and worked nights at a laundromat and she had other odd jobs) and allowed him to write full-time.

Carrie was a huge success both as a novel and in Brian DePalma’s 1976 film, and three people coming off their career peaks – composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford and book writer Lawrence Cohen – teamed up to create Carrie the musical. At the time Gore and Pitchford were just coming off the mega-success of the film musical Fame and Gore had won two Academy Awards (for Best Original Score and Best Song), one of which he shared with Pitchford. Their original idea for a Carrie musical was a relatively realistic one that, like King’s novel and DePalma’s film, kept the fantastic elements – Carrie’s discovery that she has telekinetic powers and the final bloodbath (literally) at the high-school prom – carefully balanced against the realistic ones. They started writing Carrie the musical in 1981 but it took seven years to see the light of day on stage, during which time the Broadway musical as a whole went through a revolution of sorts, abandoning traditional song-and-dance numbers in favor of giant spectacles like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Starlight Express.

After the original backers – a straight couple from New York – pulled out they found a new “angel” in a German man named Friedrich Kurz, who promised to back the production. And after they did a rough workshop performance of the first act, and shopped it to various directors (including Mike Nichols, who said he thought it would be a huge success but decided he didn’t want to do it), they decided to make Carrie a co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company of Britain and do the out-of-town tryouts at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s home theatre in Shakespeare’s home town, Stratford-on-Avon. At the time the Royal Shakespeare Company was deeply in debt and desperate for a cash cow on the order of the previous mega-musical they’d produced, Les Misérables, for which they’d made a terrible deal that netted them $10 million while the other producers (notably Cameron Macintosh) made the really big money. So they were looking for another cash cow and they thought they’d found it in Carrie, but things really ran off the rails when the Royal Shakespeare Company offered them a director, Terry Hands. He was desperate to establish himself since his directorial partner on Les Misérables, Trevor Horn, had won a huge reputation on the strength of that show and Hands hoped that Carrie would have a similar effect on his own career.

Alas, Hands was British, which meant he’d never attended a U.S. high school and thus had no understanding of the elaborate status rituals between students of different class backgrounds. What’s more, instead of a realistic production he wanted a stylized one, with a single plain set with movable elements that would shift to suggest the various settings. Gore, Pitchford and Cohen should have realizes their director had utterly no understanding of the material when they told him they wanted the high-school sequences to look like the musical Grease – and Hands sent them costume designs that looked more like togas than normal U.S. high-schoolers’ clothes. They called him and it turned out Hands had thought they meant they wanted it to look like ancient Greece, and they were reduced to protesting, “Hey, we meant Grease the show, not Greece the country!” Hands also decided to cut the between-numbers spoken dialogue to a bare minimum and tell the story through dance instead of words. The result was a show that split critical reaction right down the middle – half the audience loved it and half hated it – and the show’s leading lady, Barbara Cook (playing Carrie’s religious-fanatic mother), was nearly decapitated by a piece of Hands’ elaborate scenery on opening night. She agreed to stay with the show for the rest of its run in Stratford but insisted she be replaced before the Broadway opening – and Gore, Pitchford and Cohen were able to get the actress they’d originally wanted, Betty Buckley.

The show moved to Broadway for $8 million (the entire production budget of The Phantom of the Opera) and closed after just 16 previews and five formal performances at the Virginia Theatre. The producers were hoping to keep the show going long enough so the word of mouth would spread and the people who actually liked it would be able to tell their friends to go see it – but they got screwed over by Friedrich Kurz, who behind their backs closed all the bank accounts that had funded the show and flown back to Germany. (One wonders if he’d got the money by spending 25,000 percent of the show and absconding with the proceeds. A clip of the original Mel Brooks version of The Producers appears in this show as a representation of a show so bad it flops on opening night.) So they had no money to pay the cast or crew and they had to shut down instead. I first heard of Carrie the musical from David J. Skal’s book The Monster Show, which didn’t include the off-Broadway revival from 2012, in which Gore, Pitchford and Cohen undid all the stylization Terry Hands had added, restored much of the cut dialogue and had, if not a runaway hit, at least a succes d’estime. But the original 1988 debacle has become such a Broadway legend that a book about famous Broadway flops was actually called Not Since “Carrie.”