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Carrie The Musical
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts
Through April 5
RECOMMENDED:
Probably no musical has ever been more maudit than this adaptation of the Stephen King novel, Carrie The Musical (the material perhaps best known from the 1976 hit Brian De Palma movie starring Sissy Spacek, also fashioned, as here, by writer Lawrence D. Cohen). Despite its development by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the original 1988 Broadway production closed nearly immediately upon opening after derisive reviews and sharply mixed audiences, and with its $8 million loss, became enshrined as the most expensive instant flop in legit history.
Nevertheless, inside that bloated white elephant of a mounting lurked a sturdy premise and a leaner, theatrically viable show on which the steadfast creators never gave up, persistently tinkering until a successful 2012 off-Broadway resurrection established its essential viability. Still not satisfied, this Southern California premiere represents a further revision of the piece, in a most inventively conceived and dastardly rendered showcase for this sanguinary Cinderella parody. Like that hand snatching up from the grave at the film’s climax, this revival from the dead proves both psychologically disturbing and wickedly amusing. It’s terrific.
Divided into high school cliques by colored wristbands, the audience is ushered into the auditorium through a haunted house atmosphere festooned with scabrous graffiti and fetid grostequeries, where they cram into puritanically hard seats in the round about a tightly constricted stage territory, suggestive of the ritual altar space of Greek tragedy. Imagine, if you can, the surprise and delight when that performance arena proves to be sinously flexible, as sections of the audience bleachers are suddenly moved en bloc headlong into the action and subsquently scrambled to create a diversity of playing areas. Is it a gimmick, mimicking a Disneyland thrill ride? Of course, yet it is invariably used organically to intensify the relationship with the action, just as any camera movement ought invariably to be motivated. The publicity calls it “environmentally immersive”, and why not?
Everyone knows the story of naïve misfit Carrie White (Emily Lopez), so untutored by her religious fanatic mother Margaret (Misty Cotton) that when at 17 she experiences her first period in the gym shower, she becomes an abject object of taunting and bullying for believing she is bleeding to death. When one of the popular girls, Sue (Kayla Parker), feels remorse at the wolverine pack savagery, she contrives to have her sports captain boyfriend Tommy (Jon Robert Hall) ask Carrie to the senior prom, an act of extreme contrition that leads to extreme unction, as Carrie’s newfound telekinetic powers (associated with her coming into womanhood) wreak the wrath of terrifying revenge on her tormentors.
Though now bereft of any surprises, the plot and metaphors still remain both boldly and subliminally evocative, and any near contemporary of Stephen King who attended a public high school would likely be subject to, if not PTSD, then at least traumatizing flashbacks. The accumulating sense of dread and repressed rage are most effectively rendered under the consistently inspired direction of Brady Schwind.
It’s hard to envision a superior rendition: Lopez and Cotton are sublimely charismatic, and the balance of the cast, while inevitably “types”, makes their roles distinctive and individual, and everyone sings well. Particularly noteworthy, the ubiquitous sound designer Cricket S. Myers is always prone to push herself to new excellences, and her canny and supple miking and mixing adds an aural component to that environmental immersion. Scenic designer Stephen Gifford manages a final act coup de theater in suddenly enlarging the stage for the big prom, transforming what is essentially a raised curtain into an audience gasp.
Conceding this first-rate production, just how good a musical is Carrie The Musical after all? Certainly misbegotten and sorely underrated, yet still not irrefutably top-drawer. None of the songs (by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford of the movies Fame and Footloose) promise to stand alone in posterity, yet they do cohere into seamless musical theater, dramatizing the action in heightened, lyrical form and propelling the underlying vision forward with integrity and commitment, if less wit and devilry than one might have hoped.
Necessarily lacking the gleeful sadism of the original movie, it traffics drolly in cruelty and torment as recognizably primal emotions, with just enough dollops of blasphemy and irreverence to make it perhaps more contemporary considering what a period piece it otherwise might be. As the anti-Grease, it certainly merits far more respect and salubrously transcends the stink of tawdry exploitation, though not without aptly reveling in it.
In a just world, this incarnation would follow this brief run with a moveover to a midsize house in Los Angeles for a long and successful tenure, though if the musical has any message, it would be that justice in this world requires supernatural self-help.
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada; Tues.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through April 9 (562) 944-9801, www.lamiradatheatre.com
