The Broadway musical “Carrie” is remarkably durable.
It opened — and closed — in May 1988.
All these years later, it remains the gold standard of Broadway fiascos, despite the best efforts of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
But “Carrie” — based on the 1976 movie thriller about a troubled teenager with telekinetic powers — isn’t resting on its laurels. The flying knives are being sharpened, the buckets of stage blood are being refilled, the prom dresses are being dry cleaned.
“Carrie” is returning to the stage, this time off-Broadway, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre starting Jan. 31.
MCC is producing the show, and Monday night, at a fund-raiser, it offered a sneak peek at the new production.
Marin Mazzie, who will be playing the crazy mother, and Molly Ranson, who’ll play Carrie, sang a powerful duet, “Stay Here Instead.”
Ranson also sang the haunting title song, and Mazzie wowed the crowd with the best number in the show, “When There’s No One.”
That song, as sung by Betty Buckley in the original production, stopped every performance — all 21 of them. It silenced, at least for a few minutes, the titters and guffaws that greeted every scene of the gaudy $9 million production back in 1988.
The creators of the show — book writer Lawrence D. Cohen and songwriters Dean Pitchford and Michael Gore — were on hand Monday to discuss the saga of “Carrie.”
“They were relaxed,” one of my spies says. “They were game. But you could tell that they were mortally wounded by the experience.”
In the audience was a dresser who had great fondness for the show because, as she said, she got “tons of overtime cleaning blood off the clothes.”
The original production ended with mother and daughter collapsing in pools of blood at the foot of a garish white staircase that looked like something on which Peter Allen might samba.
The creators pinned the blame for the failure of “Carrie” on the original director, Terry Hands, who was running the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time.
Why did you pick him? they were asked.
The answer: Their agent, Sam Cohn, then one of the most powerful men on Broadway, insisted that they meet him. Hands, they said, talked a good game, and they fell for his idea for the show.
Hands wasn’t the only director interested in “Carrie,” however. On paper, the show sounded like a winner, since both the movie and the Stephen King novel on which it was based were huge hits.
Mike Nichols, the creators said, loved the idea, but wanted to dump the prom scene and come up with a new ending.
Bob Fosse was in the mix as well, but he had in mind a version so dark and terrifying it would have alienated the matinee ladies.
(It would, I bet, have been brilliant.)
The new production will be directed by Stafford Arima, who staged the popular off-Broadway musical “Altar Boyz.”
Arima’s concept, sources say, is closer to Fosse’s. He wants to strip away the camp quotient — good luck to you on that front! — and mount a spare, chilling production.
The creators have rewritten the show from top to bottom. The original closely tracked the Brian De Palma movie. The new version is much closer to King’s novel, which is an amalgam of first-person accounts and police reports.
Pitchford and Gore have also written 10 new songs, including a stirring duet called “You Shine,” which was also performed Monday night.
The whole thing sounds fun. And it’s about time “Carrie” got back in the ring.
Because who isn’t tired of hearing about “Spider-Man” yet again?