Is notorious Broadway flop, Carrie being resurrected?

The Stephen King story about a teenage girl with telekinetic powers and an overbearing mother became a big screen hit in 1976, the adaptation, boasting a career-defining performance from Sissy Spacek as Carrie, is now an established horror classic with many subsequent attempts to cash in on its enduring popularity failing dismally. And chief among these missteps, which include a made for TV film, planned as a pilot for a TV series that never took off and an underwhelming 1999 sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2, is the Broadway show.

Let’s talk facts. The 1988 show lasted for five (yes, we’re talking counting on one hand, people) performances, lost $8 million (the biggest disaster ever at the time) and is so infamous a stain on Broadway’s illustrious history that it earned a name check in Ken Mandelbaum’s book, Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Musical Flops (order a copy here in the UK and here in the US). We’re talking the grimmest of the grim here.

And yet Seller and McCollum, whose impressive credentials include such hits as Avenue Q, Rent and West Side Story, are considering having another stab at it with a six-figure workshop scheduled for next month. For this reading, writers Dean Pitchford, Lawrence D. Cohen and Michael Gore are revising their original book and score, while it’s thought that Marin Mazzie will step into the athletic pumps of sympathetic gym teacher, Miss Collins. There’s no news as yet regarding casting of the two main roles, that of Carrie and her mother, so there’s still time to work on your dripping-in-pig’s-blood look.

It’s believed that the Greek tragedy motif, introduced to the high school saga by the original director, former Royal Shakespeare Company helmer Terry Hands, which saw the high school students dress in togas (much to the amusement of the few that saw it), will be dropped and the show assume a new direction. Well, it sounds like they have little to lose and all the best to them. If the show does make it before the public, we’ll be in the front row, cheering, wearing our Carrie – “you will die” T-shirts!

[via New York Post]