theater

Broadway’s Most Notorious Bomb, Carrie, Will Be Revived

In a matter befitting its subject, the 1988 Broadway musical adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie had a short, cruel life: Teased mercilessly by critics, it closed spectacularly three days after its opening and lost a record-setting investment of $7 million. Perversely, its reputation has only grown since; the fact that the actors never got to record a cast album is one reason, but its evergreen status as the Broadway bomb of all time made it inevitable that someone would leverage that buzz into a revival. Meet your someone: It was announced today that Altar Boyz director Stafford Arima is developing a reworked take on Carrie for an upcoming season at the MCC Theater, and he promises that all the campy songs will be cut (boo!) and Carrie’s mad mother will be “humanized.†So basically, it’s like if they’d taken Xanadu and made a dead-serious version of it? (Sad, since our ticket would have been bought to a full-throttle camp version with Jane Krakowski as Margaret White.) [NYT]

Broadway’s Most Notorious Bomb, Carrie, Will Be Revived