After the first nuclear explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer said that the atomic scientists had known sin. It may be that with Carrie the directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company have known sin. Like Oppenheimer and his colleagues who ventured from the realm of pure knowledge to that of impure action, Terry Hands, the artistic director of the RSC, has ventured from the realm of nonprofit, state-subsidized art to that of the commercial theater, with its big-money risk, superhype and all the seductive impurities that go with a Broadway musical.
"Carrie" aroused tremendous controversy in Britain: why was the RSC, arguably the finest classical repertory company in the world, trying desperately to iron out the zillion kinks in what is now estimated to be a $7 million Broadway musical? Because, answrered Hands, the RSC was going deeper into the red while subsidy under the Thatcher regime dwindled. A good reason, and if Hands also wanted the kind of commercial success being enjoyed by Trevor Nunn, his former RSC coeval, who could blame him? Still, the "Carrie" connection has raised issues concerning the nature and destiny of theater in today's bottomline world -- issues that will not go away.
"Carrie," however, may do just that. The lesson may be, if you're going to sin, go all the way. Hands, who has a long and brilliant record directing the classics, has tried to have it both ways and winds up somewhere in middle limbo. "Carrie" even looks like limbo: Ralph Koltai, the master RSC set designer, has created an environment of white and black slabs and spaces that has all the warmth of the central meat locker at Swift & Co. In the first scene the space is meant to be a high-school gym, and you know there's trouble when 12 kinetic cookies in white gymsuits leap and cavort while singing an anthem of pubescent anxieties including one about hating your body. Since these young women have the world's greatest bodies, the show immediately leaps into a logical quandary.
Powder puff:
"Carrie" of course is based on Stephen King's superselling horror novel about a teenager repressed by her religious-fanatic mother and tormented by her schoolmates. Brian De Palma turned this into a wickedly effective movie, but the show's narrative is oddly pointless and unfocused, despite the fact that its book is by Lawrence D. Cohen, who wrote the screenplay. The movie, for example, puts Carrie's powers of telekinesis into the real universe of teenage girls, but the show (until the big revenge climax at the prom) reduces them to cute nothings like a hairbrush and powder puff that float about doing the kid's toilette. And the prom-apocalypse, with its crashing chords and whizzing laser beams, is just sound and fury signifying silly.
Composer Michael Gore's music for the movie "Fame" had a genial pop appeal; here he's fallen victim to the deadly virus of opera-ism that's increasingly endemic. But Dean Pitchford's lyrics do contain my favorite recent Broadway couplet: "It's a simple little gig,/You help me kill a pig." Those words are sung by Charlotte d'Amboise, a dancer-singer who as Chris, Carrie's chief tormentor, gives the show's most enjoyable performance. As Carrie's Bible-banging mother, Betty Buckley lavishes her fine voice on the most "operatic" numbers in Gore's score and must play a scene in which she curses and slaps her poor daughter around, finally stuffing her into a trapdoor, one of the most repugnant scenes in the noble history of Broadway musicals. As for English teenager Linzi Hateley, who plays Carrie, one can only wish this pleasant performer a happier future in her native land. Our native land is best represented by choreographer Debbie Allen. Allen's ideas are eclectic, with echoes that range from Bob Fosse to the U.S. Olympic gymnastic team. Her work, as executed by a youthful, sexy, daredevil troupe of dancers, female and male, has the only real human energy in this strange farrago. It would be interesting to see Allen direct a real Broadway musical.