Those who have the time and money to waste on only one Anglo-American musical wreck on Broadway this year might well choose "Carrie," the new Royal Shakespeare Company co-production at the Virginia Theater. If "Chess" slides to its final scene as solemnly and pompously as the Titanic, then "Carrie" epires with fireworks like the Hindenberg. True, the fireworks aren't the greatest; the intended Stephen King pyrotechnics wouldn't frighten the mai-tai drinkers at a Polynesian restaurant. But when was the last time you saw a Broadway song and dance about the slaughter of a pig? They've got one to open Act II of "Carrie," and no expense has been spared in bringing the audience some of the loudest oinking this side of Old McDonald's farm.
Fans of this musical's source material, Mr. King's Gothic novel of the same title, will remember why a horde of mean-spirited high school students ends up at a pig sty. They want to pull a blood-splattering practical joke on Carrie, the class loser., at the senior prom. But why would the kids perform an exuberant number titled "Out For Blood" - leaping over the trough under flashing red disco lights - while carrying out the butchery? Presumably there are still some mysteries that mankind is not meant to unravel. Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of "Carrie" from the "Moose Murders" of Broadway lore.
Were the rest of the evening as consistent in its uninhibited tastelessness, "Carrie" would be a camp masterpiece - a big budget excursion into the Theater of the Ridiculous. Even so, one is grateful for the other second-half pockets of delirium, including a song in which the telekinetically empowered Carrie (Linzi Hateley) cutely serenades her ambulatory powder puff, hairbrush and prom shoes. As Carrie's stern mom, a religious fanatic dressed up in dominatrix black from wig to boots, even the exemplary Betty Buckley earns one of the show's bigger unwanted laughs. "Baby, don't cry," she gently tells her daughter after stabbing her with a dagger.
Most of "Carrie" is just a typical musical-theater botch, albeit in the echo West End style (lots of smoke, laser and hydraulic effects). The disaster was not inevitable, since "Carrie" was a workable idea for a musical, and because the director Terry Hands, whose Royal Shakespeare repertory of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Much Ado About Nothing" enchanted New York, is a gifted theater man. As the film director Brian DePalma demonstrated in his screen adaptation, "Carrie" can make for scary, funny and sexy pulp entertainment - provided the thrills, wit and post-pubescent sensuality are as sharp as that knife.
The musical "Carrie" fails in all these areas. It's no surprise that the visual scare tactics concocted by Mr' Hands and the set designer Ralph Koltai can't compete with those on film, but surely someone might have found stage blood (porcine or human) that doesn't look like strawberry ice cream topping. Though the author of the musical's book, Lawrence D. Cohen, also wrote the film script, his work here is just a plodding series of song-and-scenery cues. The only laughs in the text of this "Carrie" are the whopping cliches in Dean Pitchford's lax, pseudo-"Bye Bye Birdie" lyrics. "Was it his voice? Was it his smile? I haven't felt so wonderful in quite a while," sings the lovesick heroine.
What is most fatal to "Carrie" is its inability to deliver its Cinderella story and the encompassing hothouse high-school atmosphere. Oppressed by her Bible-toting mom, Carrie is a naive, awkward shut-in - so unworldly that she has a near-breakdown during hr first (and perhaps a Broadway musical's first) menstrual period. When Carrie later blossoms into womanhood under the loving ministrations of a kindly gym teacher (the warm-voiced Darlene Love) and her class's foremost prince charming, the transformation should be real and moving - thereby making Carrie's eventual sadistic humiliation all the more horrifying. But if Ms. Hateley has a belter's voice in the reigning (and amplified) English rock-musical manner, she has none of the vulnerability of Sissy Spacek's film Carrie. Love and acceptance do not transform Ms. Hateley into a romantic prom queen; she still begs cloyingly for our sympathy, as one might expect from an actress whose primary previous stage experience was an orphan in "Annie."
Carrie's classmates ar even less convincing. In the opening gym sequence, the high-school "girls" are dressed like suburban aerobic instructors and look old enough to be guidance counselors. Carrie's immediate friends and enemies - roles vibrantly played in the movie by Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, William Katt and John Travolta - are amateurishly caricatured on stage (by the hideously misused dancer Charlotte D'Amboise, among others). When the casting errors are compounded by uncertain American accents, Mr. Koltai's abstract black-and-white Mondrian box of a set and Alexander Reid's grotesque sub-Atlantic City costumes, one often isn't sure where or when "Carrie" is taking place. Though one scene is set in a "Grease"-era drive-in, we also visit a teen-age "night spot" where the boys and girls dress in black leather and studs suitable for "Cruising." As choreographed by Debbie Allen, who shouldn't wait another moment to return to her performing career, Carrie's senior prom looks like the sort of cheesy foreign-language floor show one flips past in the nether reaches of cable television.
What burning passion is to be found in this "Carrie" has little to do with teen-age eroticism or Gothic horror and everything to do with a more traditional Broadway subject - settling scores with a domineering mom. The only surge in Michael Gore's otherwise faceless bubble-gum music is in those songs in which Carrie and her mother do battle.Though the matriarch remains a misogynic cartoon, the fiercely concentrated Ms. Buckley brings theatrical heat to every slap-happy bout of corporal punishment, every masturbatory hand gesture indicating her sexual repression, and every aria invoking Jesus and Satan. After a theatrical decade that has taken her from "Cats" to pigs, the time has come for Betty Buckley to receive a human musical as her heavenly reward.