Flops I Missed, Part I: Carrie

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Carrie

OK, here starts a regular feature, which is a rundown of maligned, dead musicals that I wish I'd seen.

Today, we'll talk about Carrie, which as far as I can tell, everyone on Broadway was in...

Seriously, I wish I had a nickel for every bio inPlaybill that included a credit for Carrie...

There is a great "unofficial" Carrie Web site which carries [sic] this review from 1988:

"This was one big expensive turkey musical with Betty Buckley based on the Stephen King horror story. Here are some of the blurbs from News critic Howard Kissel's review:

"Halfway through Carrie, I suddenly wished I could take back some of the nasty things I said a few weeks ago about Chess, because Carrie is so disgusting it makes Chess look adorable."

(About the female chorus he zings...) "The girls don't look like teenagers at all. Their bodies don't have the bloom of youth. They're either too angular or too fleshy. Their faces are hard and haggard, like they've just come off a bus-and-truck tour playing the hookers in Sweet Charity."

(Of the score...) "You already know the title song. Just sing "Call Me" with the word Carrie, and make the A flat as flat as possible, and you've got it.....for me the high point of the lyrics was rhyming "attitude" with "I've been screwed."

(Of the cast...) "For most of the cast, the goal seems to have been to make the characters obnoxious and everyone has succeeded mightily. The exception is the engaging Darlene Love as the gym teacher."

I couldn't possibly add anything to Howard's dead-on review. It's one of my favorites ever written. Now, the funny part is that I saw Carrie and I sort of liked it in an offbeat sort of way. Have you ever heard the expression, It was so bad it was good!

For excellent reading, I recommend the book Not since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum, however it is hard to get because it is out of print, which is truly dumb, because this book belongs in every Broadway lover library. Go to Borders, or Barnes and Noble and they can do a database search and locate a copy in one of their stores throughout the land. Incidentally, Carrie was done in 1988 and Howard Kissel still gives the world his witty reviews in the New York Daily News."
By Suzy Conn on February 7, 2005 12:28 PM | | Comments (0)


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