CARRIE. Book by Lawrence D. Cohert. Lyrics by Dean Pitchford. Music by Michael Gore. Directed by Terry Hands. Virginia Theater, 245 W. 52nd St., 246-0102. 2 hours. 15 mins.
The connoisseurs of bad taste flocked to seventh heaven when it was announced that Stephen King's Carrie was being made into a musical. Friends of mine, the ones who have a radar for the latest Chernobyl and airline-disaster jokes, were busy composing their own scores, with songs like "Mama, I'm Bleeding." News of production troubles in England was like a carrion alert to these Broadway vultures, whose squawks of anticipation reached a crescendo when ex-Carrie star Barbara Cook grumbled that revising the show was like "rearranging furniture on the Titanic."
A the preview I attended, no sooner had the overture ended than derisive laughter began to issue from certain pockets of the audience. In an odd way, the sneerers had taken on a bully pose toward the production not unlike that of Carrie's antagonists toward their victim. Why do we pick on Carrie? Is this a jingoistic reaction against the wave of British-based megamusicals flooding our shores? Does the show's $7 million price tag invoke the less-is-more myth responsible for overappraising dreary costume jewelry like Romance/Romance? Are we narrowly defining what is appropriate source material for musical theater?
Yes, yes, and definitely yes The naysayers, however, are misreading what could be an obstacle in transferring Stephen King's novel and Brian De Palma's film to the musical stage. It is not menstrual cycles and ultraviolence, but mothers. Count (you'll only need one hand) the musicals that shine the center spot on Mom. In general, a mother's concerns are domestic, lifesize. Mothers, Olympia Dukakis notwithstanding, are not sexy. Mother-child relationships-fierce, prickly, loaded with the land mines of our neuroses -- go against the grain of what people want from musicals. Poor Mom. She spends a fortune taking us to Broadway musicals, and who does she find carrying the banner of motherhood? Mama Rose in Gypsy and her descendants, the Witch in Into the Woods, and Carrie's fundamentalist, demon mother, Margaret (as in Hamilton?).
All of these women are nightmare parents, engulfing in their affections, justifying the most terrible encroachments on a child's independence in the name of maternal love but driven by the love of self. Mama Rose pumped every ounce of self-fulfillment into her reluctant children, shoving them out into the woods of sleaze and one-night stands. Margaret and the Witch, on the other hand, are overprotective to the point of suffocation, hiding their own loneliness and self-loathing under the pretense of saving their daughters from sin. They are archetypes that never sink into caricature, and their plights move us into dangerous territory that summons up a complex tangle of anger and guilt, empathy and resentment. Just like Christmas with the folks.
For all of these reasons, Carrie's mother is one of the most compelling characters to inhabit either a horror film or a Broadway musical. Propelled by envy for her daughter's youth and possibilities, she monitors her child's rebelliousness like the barnstorming Mama Rose. Margaret has one unique driving force, however, which is fear. The wrath of God is bubkes compared to what Carrie could do with those incendiary telekinetic powers of hers, a fabulous metaphor for the mysterious weapons we develop against our parents that defy both logic and gene pools. Fear is a mutual force: with it, they keep each other in check in a sadomasochistic game that has mother and daughter switching roles up to its lethal conclusion.
As long as 'Carrie' remains focused on this standoff, it is riveting musical drama. Michael Gore, who suckered me unashamedly with his ten Kleenex score for Terms of Endearment, has written some haunting melodies for Margaret and Carrie that movingly convey the women's sense of alienation and inadequacy. As Margaret, Betty Buckley has finally found a role to match a flinty persona and steely voice that until now I have found absolutely resistible. When that gaunt skull face contorts in fury or when she settles down to an aching song of loneliness, she really looks possessed. In a show constantly marred by oversimplifications, Buckley mines the humanity and weakness in Margaret; telling Carrie that "being different is the Lord's blessing," she gets you to shudder and agree with her at the same time. Linzi Hateley's frumpy Carrie is at least her match. From the minute she blasts into the pounding title song, she invests Carrie with a gravity that makes you take her seriously, even through a treacly Walt Disney dance with her wardrobe and hairbrushes. Both performances are smashing.
Unforturnately, there is a second show in "Carrie" vying for their time, a ludicrously misconceived high school comedy about Carrie's torment at the hands of her classmates. While Carrie's home life is credible, the students' sadistic preoccupations seem based on the paranoid fantasy that bullies spend all their waking hours plotting against their victims. In the film, Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen wisely portrayed the vanities of school cliques with a winking, comic-book style, which Cohen has attempted to re-create in his libretto for the show.
But Cohen treads a very fine line that is constantly trampled by his collaborators. Dean Pitchford's June-moon Iyrics are adequate for Margaret's religious homilies but lack the wit to make Carrie's tormenters really sting, and Michael Gore, whose heart is clearly not in rock music, blands out in these scenes altogether. The most dissonant note is struck by Debbie Allen, whose slithering, horny Fosse-meets-"Fame" dances (led by "Fame's" Gene Anthony Ray, who humps the air as if he has an oil rig in his jockstrap, and bad girl Charlotte d'Amboise, modeling a breast plate from a strip joint "Die Walkure") suggest a sweaty auditiorium at the Las Vegas School for the Performing Sluts.
In its grotesque poses, the student chorus seems out of place within the daunting frame of Ralph Koltai's set, which is dominated by a purgatory of knobless, high-gloss white vinyl panels. His coup de theatre, a climactic stairway to heaven, makes you laugh and gasp at the same time. It succeeds in conveying the classic tragic dimension the creators are striving for and often achieve in the Carrie-and-mother sequences. At such moments, you appreciate the authors' foresight in imagining that there was the stuff of a great musical in this mother-daughter act. They should have just left the burlesque house to Mama Rose and Baby Louise.