They're not afraid to bring back 'Carrie'

Many claim it, but I did it. I saw "Carrie" on Broadway. And, yes, it was that deliriously, stupendously terrible.

In fact, for those lucky few who actually saw the infamous floppola in its 16 previews and five performances in 1988, "Carrie" -- currently in previews for a much-anticipated revision at MCC Theater -- became an exclusive bonding experience.

The musical, adapted from Stephen King's horror classic about an outcast teen with telekinetic powers, went on to define badness for a generation of theatergoers. It even supplied the title -- "Not Since Carrie" -- for Ken Mandelbaum's indispensable book about musical failures.

Other shows have known problems, miscalculations, disappointments. But none had this one's pedigree -- the huge (for then) $7-million budget, the formidable director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (Terry Hands) and the mass fan base from both a bestselling novel (King's 1974 high-school creepfest) and a high-concept horror movie (directed in 1976 by Brian De Palma).

So imagine, if you dare, those first shocks rippling through the theater. Poor bullied Carrie's high school appeared to be populated with 28-year-old Playmates. The choreography looked like an aerobics workout for a slutty Vegas takeoff of "I Dream of Jeannie." Carrie's religious-fanatic mom walked around in a sexy satin nightgown.

And for the big moment at the prom, when buckets of pigs' blood are meant to descend on Carrie from a beam, a guy who could have wandered in from a TV show about leather gangs simply strode up to her and emptied a bucket on her head. Incoherence piled on ineptitude until our incredulity bubbled into a guilty giddiness that felt, yes, almost like joy.

But not everyone was having fun. Among the prime mourners was Lawrence D. Cohen, who had adapted the novel for the movie and, more than a decade later, took the next step and wrote the book for the musical. "It was like watching a horror story nightly," he said in a phone interview last week. "Like having one's hair burned in public."

Cohen, composer Michael Gore and lyricist Dean Pitchford are finally getting their chance to present the show they envisioned when they wrote "Carrie," which Cohen describes as "a little Cinderella-with-a-vengeance fable."

And speaking of revenge, he gets to talk candidly about Hands, the British director who, according to Cohen, "didn't have a clue" about American pop culture. "High schools, proms weren't part of his vocabulary. When things weren't working, his answer was to cut the book and present tableaux. It was a book musical that lost all its book." When the creators offered corrective notes, he says, "it was like sending them into the Bermuda Triangle."

"It's no great secret that the three of us weren't all that happy with the '88 production," he says. "Aside from Betty Buckley and Linzi Hateley [Carrie], the rest was really boneheaded. What we saw on the stage had little to do with the show we dreamed of."

Cohen, who worked with Michael Bennett on his early shows and has written many of the King adaptations for movies and TV, says Bob Fosse was interested in directing the show, but "his vision was very dark, very depressive. It is unthinkable now that these guys in their 20s didn't like Bob Fosse's vision."

The team was impressed with the "huge visual imagination and flair" of Hands' masterly Broadway productions of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Much Ado About Nothing." Besides, "When the RSC, after 'Les Misérables,' wanted to do this as its next show, it would have taken a lot to say no to that."

But it has taken almost 25 years to get over the result. The new version, which opens March 1, is what he understandably considers its "second chance." The story is updated to today, with new songs and new treatment of old songs. Cohen describes the new work as "very much 'Carrie: The Present.' "

The old Broadway spectacle has been tossed and the show scaled down for the 299-seat Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village. The staging is by Stafford Arima, best known for directing "Altar Boyz," the long-running Off-Broadway satire about a Christian boy band.

According to Cohen, "Stafford's mother took him to see it when he was in high school. He says it had a profound effect on his life." Seriously. Three weeks after the creators got together, finally, to "get back on the horse" and revisit the show, Arima happened to contact them about directing his own production.

"We get hundreds of requests, from regional theaters, high schools, colleges, Europe, Asia," Cohen says. "But they wanted to see the same show that closed. That didn't appeal to any of us." Nobody was too keen on starting the new version in New York, what Cohen, wincing, calls the site of the "crash and burn." But he says the executives at MCC were "incredibly persuasive" about doing the show here.

Before "Carrie" opens, however, Cohen would like to correct some myths that "have become truth over the years." First, he says, awful reviews didn't close down the show. Bad producing did. "A German producer fled the country and closed his bank account." Second, not all the reviews were pans and not all audiences scoffed at it. "It was polarizing," he claims. "Half the audience would give a roaring standing ovation, half were booing. The audiences were alive and volatile." Thanks to YouTube, "we have a rabid fan following and a rabid hate following."

Speaking of the "Carrie" mythology, he, sort of, jokes, "If all the people who have written and blogged about having seen the show had seen it, we would still be running."

Not if they saw the one I did.