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[0:01] Letter Sent to the Virginia Theatre, dated April 28, 1988. Dear cast of Carrie, last night was the first preview of your show, and simultaneously, a first for me. I have been a theatregoer for many years, open-minded, liberal, interested. No matter how much I dislike a show, or disagree with a performance, or piece of writing, I have never been disrespectful. As a teacher of drama and theatre at the high school level, I have taught that good manners are essential for the respect of the actors as well as the audience members. Yet, despite all I have taught, last night I booed, and I booed angrily and vociferously. I was appalled by this tasteless, vulgar, degradingly abusive, quote, entertainment, end quote.

I booed hugely talented people who worked so hard for so little reward. I booed my favorites, like Betty Buckley, for embarrassing the two of us by appearing in this worthless trash. I booed the producer, the director, the gyrations of Debbie Allen's offensive choreography. Most of all, I booed the state of theatre, the state of mind that could actually produce this. I have never been more offended by any production I have ever seen, and I apologize for being rude. But you owe me an apology as well.

[1:41] Chris Adams: Chapter Four, Broadway. They'll make fun of you, they will break your heart. Welcome back to Out For Blood, I'm Chris.

[1:47] Holly Morgan: And I'm Holly. And this is our very deep dive into the life and times of Broadway's infamous flop, Carrie the Musical. It's the flop by which all other flops are measured. Carrie the Musical had completed its out-of-town tryout. Very out-of-town tryout. In the historic British town of Stratford-upon-Avon, often described as Disneyland for Shakespeare. Spoiler, there are no rides.

[2:13] Chris Adams: No. The Stratford production hadn't exactly gone smoothly, with critics trashing the show, continual rewrites, a tense creative team, and a leading lady who had handed in her notice via a fairly unsubtle sledgehammer metaphor. The next stop was Broadway, and already rumours about the state of the show were swirling. Despite this being pre-internet, word soon crossed the Atlantic that Carrie was a hot ticket for anyone with an interest in car crash theatre.

[2:43] Holly Morgan: Obviously there was gossip from Stratford. Stephen Dolgenoff is a lifelong Carrie fan.

[2:49] Stephen Dolgenoff: All you would get, you would get this magazine called Theatre Week, where you would open to the single gossip column, and there might be a little paragraph about the show you're interested in. I knew that Barbara Cook had been in it, and then left, but Betty Buckley was in it. That's all I knew.

[3:16] Chris Adams: Despite selling out in Stratford, a limited run of four weeks, advance sales for its open-ended Broadway run were not strong.

[3:21] Holly Morgan: I can't understand that. We would have been on those tickets like a rat on a pizza.

[3:25] Chris Adams: Do you think we were the target demographic?

[3:27] Holly Morgan: Exactly, yes. The thing is, most of the big 80s Broadway juggernauts like Les Mis, Cats and Starlight Express had transferred from lengthy and successful West End runs, and had taken their buzz with them. Carrie had none of that. In addition, Carrie had not been cheap to make. The highly complex design of the show, not to mention the large pan-Atlantic cast, meant that its so-called war chest of funds was depleted, and there was little in the way of reserves to help the show survive for long, unless ticket sales picked up.

[4:01] Chris Adams: Everything was riding on strong word-of-mouth during the New York previews to help Carrie survive the barrage of gossip and rumour. The word on the Great White Way was that the show might not last beyond opening night. The producers had to work fast to position Carrie as that season's must-see hit. One tried-and-tested way to sell your big Broadway musical? The Tony Awards, a memorable performance at the ceremony to showcase your cast, plus ideally winning a few awards, can have a huge impact on sales. The show's creative team already had eyes on prizes for its young lead, Lindsay Haitley, and Betty Buckley, the big-star name now confirmed as stepping into the role of Margaret White.

[4:35] Holly Morgan: However, this is Carrie the musical, and of course nothing goes smoothly. Carrie's opening date had been set for May 4th, 1988. This was also the cut-off date for shows to be eligible for Tony nominations. Cast member Joey McNeely recalls.

[4:45] Joey McNeely: The moment I realized that we were destined to fail is when they pushed our opening night date back. We were supposed to open before the Tony date. According to a news article, a quote, technical glitch meant that the show's set had not been shipped from the UK in time, forcing a two-week delay for the show's opening. And as soon as they pushed that date behind the Tonys, I was like, well, that's a kiss of death. You don't even get a shot at a Tony nomination. You know, you're not even part of that discussion. So as soon as they pushed it back, for I guess technical reasons or whatever, I actually think it was a money reason.

[5:29] Jeremy Sturt: Deputy stage manager Jeremy Sturt had flown to Broadway well ahead of the cast to hand over his show-calling duties to the New York team, including head stage manager Joe Lorden. With time to spare, Joe suggested they go and catch up with a joint acquaintance, Barbara Cook.

[5:39] Joe Lorden: I said, yeah, but what about doing the book and all of the, you know, when do we want to sit down and go through this? He said, oh, we're not going to do that. He said, you're going to call the show. I was like, what? So I didn't even know. I, by the time I arrived in New York, you know, I had no idea. He said, yeah, yeah. I made a decision. He said, fuck that, you're doing it. And that was exactly what he said. So, and I said, why? He just said, it's your baby, you're doing it.

[6:14] Chris Adams: Calling a show on Broadway aged 22, 23, that's pretty impressive going.

[6:20] Jeremy Sturt: Yeah, right. According to Jeremy, it was producer Fritz Kurtz's inability to properly complete the customs form that led to the delay, rather than any kind of technical issue. He hadn't filled in the carnets properly, so the set got compounded in the port of New York. So the reason we went to three-day-week rehearsals was because we were four weeks behind on the build. So we rehearsed for longer in New York than we should have done, and we delayed the whole opening by five weeks. And that delay was critical. Until the set could be built, the Virginia Theatre would sit empty, and Carrie would miss the cut-off for that year's awards season. Don't worry, the show is going to be eligible for the awards the following year, the article claims somewhat optimistically.

[7:01] Holly Morgan: Hmm. Soon though, the British cast arrived in New York, and without a set to work on, rehearsals were cut down to just three days a week. They had plenty of time to play. You know, when the kids from England came to New York, they were just all agog, and they were having such a wonderful time, and they were a little, they were gorgeous, beautiful young dancers, and they were shocked at the size of the portions in New York restaurants, and they were all afraid they were going to get that before the show opened.

[7:34] Chris Adams: We could get into all the clubs for free, and, oh, you're in Carrie. We just had, we'd go to the door and just say, oh, we're in Carrie, with our British accent, and they'd let us in. I mean, Sally, Sally got a, I remember she was, she had an apartment on Madison Avenue that they put her in, a gorgeous apartment on Madison Avenue on the New York, and she was like, this is boring as hell, I cannot be on the East Side, Madison Avenue. So she ended up getting a boat, like renting a boat, and she said she had a boat, she lived on a boat.

[7:59] Holly Morgan: The dancers had already been rehearsed to within an inch of their lives for nearly half a year in Britain, but Terry Hands couldn't resist trying to add his own special touches to choreographer Debbie Allen's well-drilled routines.

[8:10] Sally Ann Triplett: Debbie Allen went to the opening night of Into the Woods because her sister was playing the lead. Her sister was Felicia Rashad, who played the witch in Stephen Sondheim's new musical, which had recently had a cast change a few blocks away at the Martin Beck Theatre. And she went out, and she, you know, maybe had a couple of drinks, whatever, and she went home late. She got to work a bit late. It was only like 20 minutes or something, maybe half hour tops. As she came in the rehearsal room, it's 8.90 down by Union Square, the infamous rehearsal rooms there. The same venue as the Carrie workshop reading a couple of years earlier. When she came in the rehearsal room, she had on these big dark glasses.

And she was always so showbiz, Debbie Allen. She was always, you know, she always just wanted to make it fun. She was fabulous. I loved working with her. And she came in the room with her glasses, and she just, like, tipped her glasses down and didn't say anything and just stared. Because Terry Hands was re-choreographing the opening number, literally re-choreographing it. God bless your soul, Mr. Hands. But he was, he was literally down in a kind of a lunge with all us girls trying to, and she just was like, no.

[9:33] Chris Adams: Meanwhile, Carrie's marketing machine kicked into gear. The show's logo was simple and stark, taking inspiration from the instantly recognisable icons pioneered by the British mega-musicals making their way from the West End to Broadway.

[9:46] Mark Shenton: Well, De Winters, as you know, were the lead advertising agency who were responsible for creating those brand logos. So famously, they created the one for cats, or the cat size, which went global. The phantom mask still used today is essentially the image for Phantom. Mark Shenton has had every job in this podcast.

[10:09] Chris Adams: He's running theatre.

[10:10] Mark Shenton: The company was making a name for itself, creating simple but memorable logos for entertainment titles, mimicking the way that popular consumer goods had cleverly used branding to expand across the globe. And it was obviously a dead circle that they went there because they were the leading branders of musicals in that way. I mean, I thought the Carrie logo was incredibly subtle and clever, the line drawing of Carrie's face, and there was almost that teardrop as well on it. It was really clever. Probably too subtle, ultimately.

[10:43] Chris Adams: The Carrie logo sits in a sea of black, a selection of wiggly red and white lines forming the rough shape of a girl's face, with a single red tear rolling from her eye. If you'd like to see a picture of Chris with his cherished Carrie poster, go on over to our Instagram or Google Man Experiencing Pure Joy. Actually, don't Google that. Whatever you do. It's a different thing. There's a different thing. The lines on the poster are based on Zenna symbols. These are from cards used to conduct experiments around telekinesis and extrasensory perception. Great idea, in theory. But for some, the logo was too complex and unclear. It lacked the instant clarity of the Phantom's mask or the reflective cat's eyes. For a brand new show, could those curvy white and red lines be relied upon to convince a sceptical public that Carrie was the hot ticket of the season?

[11:28] Holly Morgan: The Carrie team saw an opportunity on Broadway at a time when homegrown American hits were few and far between. Broadway had really been on a downward swing. It had been really bleak on Broadway. There were seasons when hardly anything opened. Any new musicals opened. There was a season when I think there was Sunset Boulevard kind of won the Tony Award by default because there was nothing else that year.

[11:50] Chris Adams: In the mid-80s, the Broadway neighbourhood was also not a welcoming one for many potential audience members. The Thor Theatre District had become the snowman's land a bit. I remember my first trip to New York was in 1982, and it was really quite solid. And yet there still was a beating heart of Broadway there, which produced shows like, at that point, my first trip to New York. The first show I saw, one of the first shows I saw on Broadway, was the original production of Dreamgirls, which was the musical art form at its highest.

[12:18] Holly Morgan: There was an even more tragic factor in Broadway's downturn. But this was also the time, remember, when HIV AIDS presented itself, and it sort of destroyed an entire generation of Broadway theatre makers. So an awful lot of actors, directors, composers were laid waste by AIDS. And that included, of course, famously Michael Bennett, the genius behind A Chorus Line.

[12:44] Chris Adams: The so-called British invasion had seen a slew of ready-made West End musicals filling empty Broadway houses. Obviously Cats had led the charge, but then we'd had Phantom. We'd also had Starlight Express, which ran a number of years at the Gershwin. We also had, and it culminated notoriously in Carrie, going to Broadway in 1988. Carrie's major selling point would be the casting of Betty Buckley, a well-known Broadway name. The team had courted Betty from the beginning, but early negotiations had failed.

[13:10] Kim Criswell: While agents thrashed out the details and tried to persuade her to sign on, other performers were being approached as a backup plan. I was in rehearsal for Jesus Christ Superstar at Paper Mill Playhouse, bringing the whitest Mary Magdalene in the history of the world to the stage. Oh my God, she should not look like me. Anyway, but I was in rehearsal for that. Now, we'd been hearing the rumblings about this production of Carrie that was going on in Stratford. And so we'd been hearing about it. And I, of course, knew her a little bit. I knew Barbara Cook a little bit. So I'd been paying attention to all the gossip that was coming across the Atlantic. And so I knew things weren't going well. And anyway, they came over and Barbara had bowed out of it.

And so all of a sudden, they're looking for a new Margaret White. And I mean, I was like 29 or 30. I wasn't seeing myself as that. Barbara Cook, who had played the role in England, had been in her early 60s. Anyway, I was in rehearsal. I get a call from my agents because everybody assumed, including me, that Betty Buckley would be who they get. Betty Buckley had played the role of the gym teacher in the 1977 Carrie movie directed by Brian De Palma. She'd been in the film. And it was like a great it'd be a great coup. And she was kind of a name. And, you know, she'd done TV, too. So that helped. And she was the right age. So so everybody said, well, they'll get Betty Buckley. They should get Betty Buckley. And I agreed with that.

[14:40] Dean Pitchford: Oh, anyway, I was surprised to hear that I had an audition for it, and I'm like, well, I'm in rehearsal, I'm not really available, I'll go anyway. So I went to the audition, we talked about the show, and we talked our way through it, and, you know, and I put some songs on tape for them to send back to England, and around the piano, and I said, guys, you do know I'm too young for this? I mean, I can't have a teenage daughter, I'm not old enough. And they said, well, we don't care, you can sing it. They said, Barbara Cook was too old, we don't care. But Kim was certain she wasn't quite right for the part. I was like, okay, I said, but what about, I heard you guys were getting Betty Buckley. And they were like, well, and they basically let me know that negotiations weren't going well.

So they were getting some other options for themselves. And I pretty much said, listen, you're going to need to just bite the bullet and get Betty, I think. Kim ended up playing the role 28 years later at the Southwark Playhouse in London, and we can confirm she was excellent. She aged into the role, as will I. And we'll be hearing more from Kim and her experiences playing Margaret later in the series. Perhaps taking her advice, the creative team did indeed bite the bullet and agreed to pay up for Betty Buckley. It had been a long time coming. When Barbara Cook had made clear her desire to leave, producers had once again tried to woo Betty, asking her to fly to the UK to take over the role there.

She didn't, but they persisted, sending her a video of the show. By the time rehearsals in New York were approaching, she was still hesitant and increasingly aware of the rumors that were doing the rounds about the quality of the show. Her agent gave her a stressful ultimatum. Without you in the show, it's not going to happen. And a young, enthusiastic cast would all be out of work. The agent persuaded her to give it a go, insisting that she could make the role her own and play a part in turning the show around. Betty also knew she could bring a level of physicality to Margaret that Barbara had been unable to, and relishing the opportunity to do intensive character work with Lindsay, she finally signed on the dotted line. As well as a performer, Betty was an acting coach and approached the role with vigor, forming a strong bond with Lindsay from the start.

[17:00] Lindsay: Well, I remember when we started rehearsing in New York and Betty said to me, you know, what time's your car picking you up in the morning to take you down to rehearsals? And I was like, car? You know, I mean, I was 17 in a big city, still supposedly having to be chaperoned. And, you know, I was sort of walking the streets of New York trying to find my way to a rehearsal room. And she said, and you know, to be fair to her, she said, right, I am now going to start picking you up. My car will pick you up on the way. So she, you know, she took on that responsibility of basically making sure I was safe to get to and from the rehearsal rooms. Admittedly, it did mean that most of the time we arrived at Betty's time, which was never really, she wasn't the best timekeeper in the world.

And she would admit that herself. But, you know, I mean, what a wonderful gesture of her because obviously, I mean, she was a big star and she was in a totally different league to me, but there was no care or nurturing of a 17-year-old young woman. Betty encouraged Lindsay to throw everything she had into their shared scenes, showcasing the psychological power play and physical violence between the warring mother and daughter. It's probably important to stress how big a name Betty was at this time. Not only had she been in big Broadway shows like Cats, 1776, Pippin and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, she was also well known for her screen work, having starred in the ABC sitcom Eight Is Enough. And Betty, of course, is a tempest.

You know, she comes in with full force, very demanding. She has high, high expectations of herself and everybody around her. So that created another sort of drama. But again, the singing was just off the charts. She held a lot of sway. Audrey Levine was her understudy.

[18:47] Sally Ann Triplett: I did sit in on all of Betty's rehearsals and I am a lifelong compulsive knitter. So I was sitting there in rehearsal knitting and I, you know, I don't have to look when I knit and I'm watching, I'm paying attention. And at one point, the stage manager came over to me and said, Betty says that you're not going to pay attention and you shouldn't be in the rehearsal and asked me to leave. So I didn't know. Now, I have to preface that by saying Betty was always lovely to me. And even years later, you know, now we're Facebook friends and all that. It's not it wasn't an ugly thing. Just that her process is so intense. She was not there to play. Betty had signed on to make this role her own and make it her own.

She would. And by all accounts, the cast were blown away by the shift in energy and intensity in the show. Once Betty took on the role, you know, she just took the part to such another level, you know, and I was always a fan of her too. And I did song and dance with her too. So we all sort of knew each other a little bit, but working with her was amazing. Betty, I think was well, better casted for it. She was, you know, because of her, the intensity, which the mother was fanatical, needed to be like, I don't think Barbara ever got fanatical. She just, she was more like, I think the intention, church, the church woman, and Betty was more like the, the crazy right winger. The show went from here to literally sky high.

It took the intensity of it, the darkness, the singing of it. She's, she's, she's very kind as well. She's actually very warm-hearted, but she's just incredibly passionate about what she does. And he was brilliant to me in rehearsal. She came up to me and she said, Sally, would you like to go to, to the best singing teacher in New York? And she said, okay, tomorrow one o'clock. Wonderful. Amazing. And, and she said, I'm going to take you in my car. Wow. And she took me in a car and she, it brought me a sandwich at Carnegie Deli, which is closed down since, amazing sandwiches, which are like six inches. And we went into this apartment by Central Park and we went up there and I sat on the sofa with my sandwich and for the next hour and a half, I listened to Betty Buckley's singing lesson.

I didn't sing a note. It was an invitation to listen to her. And I'm lying on the floor doing the breathing and, you know, like only really only Betty Buckley could invite you to that and tell you that it was going to be her singing lesson. Only she could do that. But, but, you know, hats off to her. You know, what a, what a gal.

[21:39] Charlotte d'Amboise: I remember her calling me like in the middle of the night, like late, late. And she'd get on the phone and be like, hi, it's Betty and her sweet little voice. And I'd be like, hi, hi. And then she would just want to talk about her character and talk about it. And then, you know, and she would ask me about my character, which mind you, I hadn't thought about very much. And I'd be like, oh, oh, yeah, well, you know, and then, you know, she'd make me think about it, really make me dig deep. And then she, she needed also, she was trying to figure it all out. I had been, you know, been doing it. She wanted to kind of know the feel of the part and what our relationship was and everything, you know, she's that kind of an actress, which is why she's so brilliant.

And not until retrospect, did I realize that she was actually trying to help me maybe find out what the hell I was doing in my part. You know, I thought, you know what, you know, there's Betty kind of doing two things at once, being able to talk and then also like, you know, Charlotte, you got to think about this, you know, because this and that, you know. So it was actually a good thing. It was a good thing.

[22:45] Lindsay: Once the show set finally turned up, the crew could get started building it at the Virginia Theatre, working long hours to complete it so that the cast could get started with rehearsals on stage. There was a lot to do to ensure that Virginia could accommodate one of Broadway's most technical shows to date. The theatre had been selected as it had the deepest height between the sub-basement and the lighting grid, and the greatest depth from the front to the back of the stage, enough room to house Ralph Coltie's vast multifunctioning box set. And a gas pipe was installed the length of the stage to enable 30-foot flames to leap high into the air at pivotal moments during the show. Eventually, with the technical elements and the physical set in place, rehearsals were finally able to start in the theatre.

But the cast were shocked to find little thought had been given to fixing the major problems pointed out by the UK press. The plot was still muddy, especially around Carrie's special powers, with any sort of character development stripped away. The dance numbers were still overwhelming, the abstract Greek costumes had gone nowhere, much to the disappointment of the cast, and the finale was still falling flat. Concern was rife that without some kind of attention, Carrie would quickly become the punchline of catty jokes amongst New York's theatre elite.

[24:03] Dean Pitchford: Once again, Terry Hands gathered the company for a reassuring chat. Terry called us, called a meeting in the theatre when we first got back, and he said he knew what was wrong with it, and he knew how to fix it, and that we should be confident in that. And then we went into rehearsals. I would say probably the mood was not great. I mean, people just were worried that it wasn't going to be fixed. He had his idea, he was holding by it, and I do remember when we were in Stratford and we were coming to New York, and we got those bad reviews, and then there was like, they didn't change anything. And so it's like, how do you not fix stuff? I thought that there was a little bit of delusion in that sense, you know?

And I guess they were hoping that maybe, even though Barbara Cook was phenomenal, but I think that they were hoping that Betty would come in and change it all. But you can't, it wasn't about performances. It needed a different kind of structure. Instead, Terry was adamant that the show had simply been misunderstood by the Brits, and would be better received by American audiences. I remember Terry Hands coming up to me like in the dark, dark in the theater, talking to me and just telling me how the show was going to surprise everybody. And that, you know, that it's going to, you know, that the Phantom has nothing on this show. Like, sort of like the show was going to, like, and I remember thinking, am I hearing that right?

And let me get, and don't get me wrong, some of the stuff was so brilliant in the show, like crazy brilliant, and it needed, you know, fixing. But it was that time between where they messed up was that time between Stratford and New York, where real changes should have happened. You know, you could see what's working, what's not working, you could easily see that contrast between. Terry once again focused his energy on the Carrie and Margaret material, spending hours alone with Lindsay and Betty. But when it became apparent that he wasn't fixing it, he basically locked himself in a room with Betty, and they did brilliant work together. But nothing else got fixed. So there was kind of no consistent heart to the whole piece.

Carrie continued to be left exposed by its major flaw. The intense domestic scenes with Carrie and her mother poorly welded together with Debbie Allen's energetic school numbers. And it was still almost entirely sung through, with little thought given to clearing up its muddy plot. And echoing the struggles in Stratford, the delayed set build meant that the show's technical rehearsal, usually a process which can take up to three weeks for a big new musical, was compressed into just three days, an almost impossible feat for what was shaping up to be one of the most complex Broadway shows to date.

[27:00] Joey: As previews for the show finally got underway, the creative team attempted to patch up the show's problems as well as they could, using the meandering reactions of the audience as a barometer for what changes should be made. Lyrics would be altered, sections of songs would be cut, then reinstated, and small, confusing adjustments would be made before each and every performance. Time before the official opening night, when the show should have been locked for the all-important New York critics, was running out.

[27:17] So that was part of, I think, the problem, because we put things together and it wouldn't make sense. So they'd scramble to try and make it make sense. We'd be in 12-hour rehearsals during tech, constantly. And when we got to Broadway, we were in rehearsals again and during tech, we were cutting and shaping and re-choreographing. It does feel a bit like the team was reacting with deer in headlights panic at this point. And most of these changes had very little impact on the overall quality of the show or the experience of the preview audiences.

[28:40] Dean Pitchford: Right, so here is a far too detailed case study. Give it to me. There's a short song called Her Mother Should Have Told Her near the start of the show, after the girls are admonished for bullying Carrie when she gets her first period in the showers at school. We know from bootlegs that it existed for the majority of the Stratford performances, but it gets cut before the final night and is missing from the first couple of Broadway previews. The lyrics are condensed and spoken as dialogue by Chris and Sue. Fine, but then, out of nowhere, the song is back in the third Broadway preview. And there's no apparent reason why such a trivial change would have been made, but it's indicative of the patchy way the team was trying to improve the show.

Despite seeing the problems with the show and dreading the reaction from New York's influential theatre critics, the writing team continued to feel excluded from the ongoing rehearsals. They were disappointed, embarrassed and had all but given up trying to change the show's path.

[29:40] Dean Pitchford: Because we were not getting any of our changes in, it became pointless to go to rehearsals and we were not listened to. And I basically, I had an apartment in New York at the time and I stayed in my apartment in New York and I ate ice cream. And I got very, I never gained any weight when I performed in New York and not since. In that period, I gained 15 pounds. During previews of Carrie in New York, I gained 15 pounds. And I only left the house to buy new pants.

[29:51] Dean Pitchford: Audrey Levine was trying to keep track of all the changes night by night, in case she had to go on for Betty Buckley. Sitting with the audience meant that she also kept track of their reaction.

[30:49] Dean Pitchford: While not rehearsing, Betty, the show’s big name, was drafted into promotional appearances where she quickly encountered some of the cynicism facing the show. A TV ad was filmed ready to use after opening night. And in the end, for obvious reasons, the ad never aired, but it features a teenage girl cowering in a mysterious corridor as voices whisper Carrie to flashing lasers and red lights. A voiceover at the end says, "There’s never been a musical like her." Well, they got that right.

[32:38] Chris Adams: Yep. And as a side note, the ad did get one special airing. I love this. At the 2003 Tony Awards ceremony, while the real commercial breaks were happening on TV, in the theatre they played old TV ads from closed Broadway shows. And when Carrie’s ad appeared on the big screen, Debbie Allen is said to have stood up and shouted, "That’s my show!"

[33:00] Holly Morgan: Amazing. After this short break, we’ll be tracking down some of those lucky folks who actually saw the show. Back in just a minute.

[33:07] Chris Adams: OK, I think it’s time we heard from the audience members.

[33:11] Stephen Dolginoff: Yes. Playwright Stephen Dolginoff remembers being drawn in by that iconic poster. And I remember loving the artwork. I remember there were huge posters all the way down the street. I think there was like a vacant building and they just rented out the windows and I just knew that I had to go to the first preview. And I did. I hadn’t seen a photograph or anything. So I go to the theatre and I like to go to first previews and I see if I can get a ticket for the first preview. And I remember it was a woman selling tickets and she said, "Yeah, I think we can get you in." And I said, "I’m really excited about it." And I remember her saying this, Clare Isabelle, she said, "The special effects are going to knock your socks off." She said that to me and I was really excited. I got the ticket. It was probably $40, maybe $45. And it was like the fourth row centre. It was like D, row D in the centre. It was probably, you know, an unclaimed house seat.

[34:09] Peter Michael Marino: Hello, I was there for the first preview in the third row. I know exactly where I sat. I saw the Broadway version, I’m going to say at least five times. I second, yeah, I second acted it. Well, that was really easy to do before 9-11. Second acting was sneaking into the theatre at the interval. And that’s intermission for our American friends. Daring audience members would sneak through the crowds, find any empty seat they could, and see the second half of the show for free. So I second acted it quite a few times. And of course, that’s the best act, right? I mean, the opening alone. You know, what was cool, though, was that Lindsay was brand new. When we were discovering this new talent, which was cool, we were also getting to, like, live our fame dreams by seeing Jean Anthony Ray, you know, which was great.

[35:00] Mark Silva: Mark Silva is another lifelong Carrie fan. He has a very personal reminder of the show. Oh, I do, yeah. Do you want to see it? I think I can’t, which leg is it? Oh, yeah. I just thought of that logo. It makes a good tattoo, you know? Photos of Mark’s Carrie tattoo are available on our Instagram, if you’re into that sort of thing. He also recalls being drawn in by the posters.

[35:28] Mark Silva: Well, I was in New York. It was my first ever trip to New York. I had gone there with my boyfriend and his two best friends for his birthday, specifically to see Phantom of the Opera the month that it opened. And he had broken up with me in the cab on the way to the airport to go to New York. So, I was there. He was there with his two best friends, and I’m there as, like, this, like, not broken up with person. And I wandered around New York by myself, and then I was walking down some street, and I looked over, and there was a handbill pasted on the wall. I just glanced at it, and that logo of her with her hair over her nose, and I said, "Carrie, there’s never been a musical like her." And I immediately knew what it was.

It had to be. It was a musical about Carrie, Stephen King’s Carrie, and I just couldn’t believe it. So, I got very excited, and I went to the TKTS ticket booth in Times Square, and I bought my ticket. It was $50, and that was the most expensive ticket at that time that had ever been on Broadway. And my ticket was for row 81 at the Virginia Theatre.

[36:44] Scott Briefer: Even before Carrie made it to Broadway, rumours swirled about the mess the show was in. For some, the prospect of seeing a stinker live on stage was too hard to resist. Another fan, Scott Briefer, recalls. And, of course, I followed everything theatre because it was my world and my life. And the rumour was that Tommy Tune went and saw the rumour. I don’t know how true this is. Saw a performance and then got on his knees and pleaded with them to not bring it to New York because it was so, so terrible. So, you can imagine, you can imagine how interested we all were just to finally, you know, and that it was coming. It arrived.

[37:27] Stafford Arima: In 2012, Stafford Arima directed the revival of Carrie in New York, but in 1988, he was just a theatre-loving teenager in town for the weekend. You know, I was very lucky. I think I was, I always like to, probably on my tombstone, you’ll say, you know, one of the only Canadians who got a chance to see the original Carrie on Broadway. My mother took me to a matinee performance at the Virginia Theatre, which is now the August Wilson, and sat there and, you know, I was a kid from Toronto, so it wasn’t like I was in the know of musicals or what was a good musical or a bad musical. It was just a musical, and it was a Broadway musical. I sat in that theatre and was mesmerized by everything about it, just because it was a Broadway musical.

But what I remember about the experience was, I think, the first time that there was like a rock concert energy in a musical environment. I had never experienced that kind of visceral reaction to it, and, you know, I was just mesmerized by it, and then I remember I went to see M. Butterfly in the evening, so my mother, in many ways, was quite advanced in what she would take her son to see on Broadway.

[39:02] Kate Moorer Ryan: Kate Moorer Ryan was taken to see the show by a friend. It’s safe to say that she found the whole thing hilarious. She could barely get through this interview without laughing. I was in my first year of graduate school at Columbia for drama, and little did I know it was not going to lead to a lucrative career. And so I was with my best friend, Nick Mangano. He was a director, and we were both drama students, and he said, "We’re going to go see Carrie, and this is going to be an experience. You are going to remember the rest of your life." And I said, "Vicki, I don’t know how." I think it was right after the moose murders. That was another disaster. I said, "Nick, this is going to be freaking trainwreck. We go." And it’s sort of like that scene in the producers when they have the opening of Springtime for Hitler.

[39:55] Stephen Dolginoff: Thanks to the frantic ongoing rehearsals and technical hitches, preview performances frequently started late. At his show, Stephen found himself penned into the theatre lobby. So it’s like 7.45 and they haven’t let us in, and that’s kind of weird. It’s 7.50 and they haven’t let us in, and that’s really weird. And people are now sort of murmuring, and you were just sort of hearing, are they, you know, are they going to send us home? Eventually, the eager crowds were let inside. The interior of the Virginia Theatre had been transformed. And it’s one of the ugliest theatres on Broadway. It’s truly one of the truly, it’s not a Broadway gem, that particular space. But I thought when I walked in, wow, they had painted all the walls black.

You know, they had kind of maybe violated the theatre, but they had created a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful environment that really spoke, and all of the house lights were red. But the whole theatre was black. And it had been a theatre that I may not have been in before, but it wasn’t very ornate. A lot of the walls were very flat. So you could just sort of put a big black coat of paint on it without having to black out ornate details. So it was very black, and there was just a big black scrim, you know, and that was it. And I remember thinking, wow, I really got a good seat. And I remember looking around, and not that it wasn’t full, and not that it wasn’t empty, and not that it was empty, but I remember thinking, hmm, I probably could have brought a few other people.

You know, it’s not a complete, it’s not a complete sellout. We all took our seats, and I’m always the first person. I mean, literally, I literally almost always meet first. You know, I get there an hour before because they open the doors 30 minutes before, and I’m waiting in the lobby. You know, it’s probably 8.15 or 8.20 by now, and people are getting kind of restless. Stephen’s performance would eventually go up 45 minutes late.

[42:00] Stephen Dolginoff: The audience was growing restless when, suddenly… Ooh, the entire house is plunged into darkness. Like that, like a switch. And people screamed, and I screamed because it was so effective, and all they did was turn on the light switch. Ah, but stop. We’re going to leave our audience members there for now because we don’t want to give too much away just yet. Oh no, because in the next couple of episodes, we’ll be dissecting the performance itself, and going through every song, scene, and questionable design choice in far too much detail. That’s what you’re here for, right?

[42:31] Chris Adams: So for now, let’s skip ahead to the curtain call. We know British audiences reacted to Carrie with polite confusion, but how did New Yorkers respond? Well, it was less polite.

[42:43] Linzi Hateley: Oh my god, going out to bow, and like, you know, screaming, and then booing. And I remember, but I wasn’t sure if I heard booing. Like, I was like, is that a boo? Like, I remember going like, oh yeah, there’s, because it was screaming, screaming, screaming, but something sounded weird. And I remember calling my mom going, "Mom, I think, I think they’re booing when I bow. I think they’re booing me." I can’t quite put it. So, but I just never will forget that feeling. Like, oh, oh my god. It’s horrible. But then, but it was, I would just, it would only be a few people, but it was just enough to hear, like, something was not like all screams. It was kind of weird.

[43:31] Dean Pitchford: For Dean Pitchford and the writing team, the hostile reaction was no surprise. To be honest, it was thrilling and distressing, but it was not unexpected, because what we, my collaborators, Michael and Larry and I, what we were standing in the back of the theatre in Stratford and saying to each other was exactly what played out in New York.

[44:01] Dean Pitchford: We could not say to our producer and our director, see, see, this is why we wanted to address this, see, that's why those costumes don't work, see, the ship had sailed. And so it became, it was a very, it was a very hard time for my collaborators and I.

[44:22] Linzi Hateley: But if the instant reaction of the audience was to boo as the curtain fell, there was a distinct change in atmosphere when the lights came up and the two leading ladies stepped out to take their bows. There definitely was a moment, you know, I sort of remember that, I don't know whether it was a first preview or whatever, but at the end of it, the lights went out and there was a mixture of boos and cheers and it was just like, what the fuck is going on, you know, is this, do they like us, do they hate us, what is it? And Betty sort of rushed down to the front and she held my hand in the dark and I looked at her and she just went, let's see, and the lights went up and as they went up and then literally the audience erupted and stood on their feet for us, like, you know, and it's just like, so they liked it then?

You know, I mean, it was, it was like being in a boxing ring of, you know, just sort of this, this sense of, I don't know what, I think I'm winning. Oh no, I'm not winning. Oh yes, I'm winning. No, I'm not winning.

[45:31] Dean Pitchford: Dean thinks that that pivotal moment changed how people reacted to the show as a whole. Very wisely, what, at the ending tableau was Carrie and Margaret both dead on the stage. Lights go out, Betty Buckley and Lindsay Hateley stand up in place, lights bump on and how, what else is your reaction, could your reaction possibly be? If you've seen any of the footage on YouTube of their performances, it's, it's still raised, I'm still getting chills thinking about it. It still raises the hair at the base of my skull. It's, and having the two of them centre stage, you couldn't cheer loud enough or throw enough roses on that stage.

[46:21] Linzi Hateley: For most people, they just couldn't believe what they witnessed. This was a Broadway musical unlike any other. The reaction was divided. You either hated it or you loved it so much you made it a hobby. Hard relate. I have friends that I've met. I met someone the other day that didn't know I was in Carrie and they saw it. People would go back again and again. It was, it was, was becoming to, it was becoming to be a cult. And if they just had, I guess if they just had maybe two or three weeks more money in the kitty, it would have taken off and it would have stayed there a long while.

[47:00] Dean Pitchford: Ken Mandelbaum, in his seminal book about musical flops, Not Since Carrie, vividly describes the atmosphere as the audience left the theatre. He said, as the audience files out, some appear thrilled, others appalled. The word most frequently bandied about is unbelievable. Ken continues, for show freaks, this had been a night unlike any other, the kind for which they have waited a lifetime. They cannot wait to get home and call their friends. And phone lines, particularly those on the West Side, will continue to steam for hours to come. Why the West Side in particular, Ken?

[47:32] Linzi Hateley: I can't think. He goes on, the ad copy which reads, there's never been a musical like her has proved prophetic. These fans will tell their friends to get to the Virginia Theatre immediately, and many of them will return to Carrie two or three times during the two weeks of previews that remain. Carrie has become an instant legend.

[47:50] Dean Pitchford: As word got out and previews continued, the show became a theatrical event that nobody could have predicted, but for all the wrong reasons. Some fans would turn up in costume and cheer in unison at some of the more ridiculous moments during the show. Others would see the show multiple times, hysterically recapping their favourite bits in Marie's Crisis Café late into the night. But if you wanted to catch a performance of Carrie, you didn't have long.

[48:14] Linzi Hateley: The show officially opened to the press on May 12th, at a star-studded opening night. Stephen King was there. So was Kevin Bacon. Yes, of course he was. It was the late 80s. He was contractually obliged. It was the night the writers had been dreading. What was the world going to make of this bloody mess? At the Virginia Theatre, the cast changed out of their blood-soaked toga-inspired costumes and finally went to the opening night party at Stringfellows.

[48:40] Chris Adams: Can this story get any more 80s? I mean, it looks like quite the bash. We've got some photos we can post on our social media for you. There's Lindsay in a particularly bouffant blue number.

[48:50] Linzi Hateley: Oh, bless her. Lovely. I guess it's almost like her prom, isn't it?

[48:54] Chris Adams: All the party guests were handed a copy of Stephen King's novel with a special Carrie the Musical branded cover.

[49:00] Linzi Hateley: One for the shrine.

[49:01] Chris Adams: Oh, it's on there. And interestingly, there's footage of a German documentary crew interviewing people, perhaps organised by producer Fritz Kurtz on the assumption that it would be transferring there. Terry Hands answers his questions confidently in German. Show off. Cameron Mackintosh is in attendance, something that would prove lucky for Lindsay in the near future. And so is Andrew Lloyd Webber. When the German crew ask him what he thought of the show, he says...

[49:25] Andrew Lloyd Webber: I'd rather not say.

[49:27] Chris Adams: Why not?

[49:29] Andrew Lloyd Webber: I'd rather not say. I'd rather not say. You shouldn't ask me.

[49:33] Chris Adams: Pretty shady from the composer of Love Never Dies. After an hour or so, the atmosphere changed.

[49:38] Linzi Hateley: And so when opening night happened, and you always know when you go to an opening night party, you can feel in the room within an hour you get there that, oh, it's bad reviews, or, oh, it's good. You can just feel that feeling. I hate that so much, that feeling. And then, you know, nobody says anything, and you can just kind of see the weight of everything. It felt like being in an old MGM film. We were all at the opening night party, and somebody literally came in with a pile of New York Times, and they got given out, and we all flipped through. And then, you know, and then the penny dropped because of the opening title and the opening sentence, you know.

[50:24] Linzi Hateley: So, you know, of course it was very disappointing for all the work that we'd put in. If the British reviews had been harsh, the New York press were eviscerating. You might remember that we got our good friend Bryce Stratford to read the British reviews in the last episode, so it would be only right that we get another performer, another good friend, to read the American reviews. So here we have Sasha Wilson.

[50:48] Sasha Wilson: Frank Rich's review opened with the line, Those who have the time and money to waste on one Anglo-American musical wreck on Broadway this year might well choose Carrie. Newsday said, Stupendously, fabulously terrible. The rare kind of production that stretches way beyond bad to mythic lousiness. The New York Daily News went all out saying Carrie was likely to become the new reference point for Broadway atrocities. Halfway through Carrie, I suddenly wished I could take back some of the nasty things I said a few weeks ago about Chess because Carrie is so disgusting it makes Chess look adorable. Disgusting!

[51:30] Sasha Wilson: The LA Times took a swipe at Terry Hands and the British tryout. Maybe American musicals should have American directors and try out in Boston. The TV talk shows went to town. The 10 o'clock news on Fox was probably the harshest of the lot. It's so aggressively disdainful, in fact, it's worth listening to the whole thing.

[52:14] ♪ Musical number: "Carrie" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[52:54] Sasha Wilson: There were some positive notices. The New York Post gave it a glowing review, and The Hollywood Reporter called it a gripping, powerful and wondrous adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel and film. And once again, almost all the reviews highlighted the performance of Lindsay Hateley, this time alongside Betty Buckley, as a highlight of the evening.

[53:50] Dean Pitchford: In those days, you bought a full page ad in the New York Times Sunday section, and you slap it in all those, and we had all those quotes. Dean was frustrated by the lack of effort in trying to highlight the positive write-ups, which had been immediately drowned out by the mocking tabloids. We could have pulled a page full of wonderful, wonderful quotes. What we didn't have was a producer who had ever produced on Broadway before, who thought from the reaction that the show was getting in Stratford, that he didn't need any kind of a cushion, and that the show was going to sell itself. So there was no reserve, and no plan B.

[54:33] Chris Adams: In the eyes of the public, Carrie was a disaster. The next day, urgent meetings were called. After much discussion with Terry, Fritz Kurtz agreed to try and weather the storm. The show should have a chance to bed in, they argued. After all, not too long ago, Phantom and Chess had both survived poor reviews, and were doing decent business on Broadway. But crucially, those shows had stronger advanced sales and bigger investments.

[55:01] Dean Pitchford: That was my new character, Money Guy.

[55:02] Chris Adams: Thank you, I've got the range.

[55:04] Dean Pitchford: I don't think I like Money Guy.

[55:05] Chris Adams: No, I'm not a fan. We should cut him.

[55:06] Dean Pitchford: Nevertheless, they knew fans were returning to see Carrie multiple times. Would sales pick up as word of mouth from repeat attenders grew? Could Carrie become a slow-building cult hit? Could they even position it as the show that divided opinions, encouraging people to come so that they could make up their own minds?

[55:24] Chris Adams: Fritz called a meeting with the company at the theatre. Friedrich Kurtz went to the theatre. He met with the cast. He said, we are going to outrun these reviews. Don't be discouraged. We're going to give this a shot. We have the audiences behind us. You hear them out there every night. The reviews have been terrible. Okay, fine. But we're going to, but the audiences seem to love it. We get standing ovations. So we're going to keep it going and see if word of mouth can keep the show up.

[55:55] Dean Pitchford: And so they had that conversation with us all. He reminded them of the standing ovations that Lindsay and Betty were commanding in each performance, and promised he was working on finding new sources of funding to keep the show open for the lengthy run it deserved. Hugs and kisses and lots and lots of love flowed between him and the cast. They went on to do their show. He got into a limo and he went to the airport. And on the way, he called his company manager and he told them to close all the accounts.

[56:21] Chris Adams: And his co-producers in New York, the theater owners in New York who were co-producers, did not find this out until Monday morning.

[56:31] Dean Pitchford: As I remember it, at the end of that same performance, someone came on and said, sorry, change of plan. We're closing Sunday. This was a Friday. The cast had two days notice.

[56:47] Linzi Hateley: I just think we were shocked at how quickly the show went on. I think mostly how quickly the notice went up on Friday and we were closing on Sunday. Terry was on the way back to Britain, thinking he'd be returning to New York later in the month for the recording of the show's cast album. But when he got back to the office, he was in for a shock. He listened to an answer phone message from his assistant. They're going to take the show off tomorrow.

[57:13] Dean Pitchford: People try to draw a very straight line from some bad reviews to the closing of the show in five performances. It was not that. It was that there was no, there was no money to open the doors on the next Tuesday night for the performance. And the cast had left after the Sunday matinee. Everybody has to be called and told, get out of your apartment, pack your bags, go back to England, go. It was devastating.

[57:45] Linzi Hateley: For the cast, it was a complete shock. We closed, we closed so fast. You know, money was pulled very quickly before, you know, before people had time to sort of go, well, hang on a minute, you know, had you just given us a little bit longer? That there was a lot of different elements that created the drama and the speed of which it went off. The space of the show, it was all changed. I think that was the most shocking thing because we probably all thought it was going to close. But then we were categorically told, no, we're going to wait three weeks. And also all us Brits were like, oh, brilliant, three more weeks in New York, you know? But no, that was that. They had just three more performances before the end of the run, two shows on Saturday and the Sunday matinee.

You know, the way they handled it was so poorly, but, and I guess it was, it was just sort of like goodbye. And the poor English people had just set their, you know, Sally Ann Triplett, who, you know, got a year, whatever, on her book.

[58:42] Charlotte d'Amboise:

[59:12] Sally Ann Triplett:

[59:42] Charlotte d'Amboise:

[1:00:12] Dean Pitchford: Dean didn't even get the opportunity to say goodbye to everyone. I got the phone call in Los Angeles and I didn't return to New York because there was not going to be any cast recording and there was no money to do something like that. It was very abrupt. It was very abrupt and very just wrenching and heartbreaking. And I think all of us, all of us involved, the creators, my collaborators and I and the cast, we all, we were thrown backwards as if from an enormous blast. It was horrible. A day or two later, and I think I left as quickly as I could back to Britain because I just wanted to get the hell out. But I think there was about three days before my flight was ready to go or I wanted to fly on the same flight as my parents because they'd come over. So I waited to go on the same flight with them. It was something like that.

[1:01:50] Sally Ann Triplett: Dean, Michael, Larry and Betty tried to reassure Lindsay that this was not her fault. She received a call from Joe, the stage manager, and he said, come down to the theatre. And I was like, oh, no, I'm not sure. And he said, come down to the theatre. And I came down to the theatre and basically he had got all the front of house pictures that I was on. And he said, take these. And so I have in my loft Broadway front of house pictures from Carrie.

[1:02:20] Charlotte d'Amboise: New York's theatre community was taken aback. They knew the show had been ripped to shreds by the critics, but they didn't expect it to vanish quite so soon. And I mean, I walked down the street in New York for the next three days with people coming up to me. You know, this is bloody New York City. And come up to me going, I can't believe it's come off. I can't believe it. You know, we wanted to see it. And, you know, it was all fair. It was a very confusing time. And we were all left without any money. We had nothing to sort of we were just, you know, sort of I went back and went back on the doll.

[1:02:45] Sally Ann Triplett: The cast were left jobless. I was living on a boat on a houseboat on the Hudson River. I had a really cool boyfriend. We went off to Thailand after that. And I went straight back into Follies. And I was really lucky. I didn't have any kind of. I think. Mostly throughout my career, I've always tried to be like that. Whatever is meant to be is meant to be. And I was just grateful for what we've done. And happy that I mean, obviously, it must have been a shock, but I don't really remember it like that. I remember it just good, good moments.

[1:03:38] Dean Pitchford: With the company coming from both sides of the Atlantic and suddenly scattered, it was hard to collectively come to terms with what had happened for Dean. After seven long years of working on the show, it was an abrupt ending. We didn't come together. We didn't talk about it. We didn't pick at that wound for quite a long time afterwards. I didn't want to talk about it. I just and I couldn't even listen to it. It took me a long time to actually whenever I heard any Carrie stuff, the emotion in me was so uncomfortable with it because it was so raw. And it was part of it was part of me. You know, I was I was just growing. And and so it's you know, it's it's very it's very personal.

[1:04:21] Dean Pitchford: But as time passed, wounds began to heal. I think the original production, you know, we're actually very disconnected. And I think it's also because we're from two different countries primarily. And we were we were left without any closure. So it was always a discord. There was there was never harmony. Yeah. I mean, me and Kenny have remained friends because actually over the years I've lived close by. The bond that the rest of us have when we see each other is instant because we have such a shared, strong experience of something that was pretty traumatic in its own way for all of us in different ways. But also because it was an extraordinary experience. You instantly instantly connect again.

So so we've got our own little unit going on. But but in terms of the family of Carrie, that the biggest connection that I have is actually with Betty. And that has remained over the years because we went on a very personal thing together that no one else went on. But, you know, that's not that's no disrespect. But we had our own agenda and we we had a very strange experience that we had to kind of connect very strongly with.

[1:05:31] Lindsay Hateley: For Lindsay, the presence of West End producer Cameron Macintosh at the opening night was a godsend. I was fortunate that I wasn't blamed for it. And I was picked up by Cameron Macintosh, who basically said, there you go. Here's Les Mis. You come to the West End and you. So so I was put on the map. I have absolutely no regrets of being part of Carrie. And in fact, now I'm very proud of it. Lindsay Hateley Les Mis fact. Oh, yeah. There's a prerecorded scream in Act One of Les Mis in London. And it has always been Lindsay Hateley terrified eight times a week since 1988.

[1:06:07] Dean Pitchford: Dean had to come to terms with his emotions around putting his lifelong friend Betty Buckley through the experience. You know, my relationship with Betty went kind of into a hibernation. You know, when we came back to it, it was as strong as ever. But I didn't particularly I didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to say. I couldn't make apologies for something. There were no words. I'm a lyricist and I had no words. You know, it was devastating. But their friendship lived to tell the tale. I had a birthday week before last and doorbell rang an enormous bouquet. A rose of flowers were delivered. Love, love Betty Lynn.

[1:06:55] Dean Pitchford: The Broadway run of Carrie is infamous. When asked what shows they wish they'd seen, lifelong musical theatre fans will almost always say Carrie. If everybody said everybody who says they saw it at Virginia Theatre actually saw it, we would still be running. Plenty of people did see the show, though. I've got some facts. Do you want some facts?

[1:07:13] Sally Ann Triplett: Yeah, give me the facts.

[1:07:14] Dean Pitchford: According to the published grosses, Carrie was seen by 17,752 people on Broadway. Of course, many of those tickets would have been given away to reviewers, investors and other friends of the show during the previews. Carrie took $341,396 during its run. That's nowhere near its reported $8 million investment. The average attendance across the run was around 850 tickets a night in a theatre with a capacity of 1,200. And look, speaking as an Edinburgh Fringe veteran, that is a lot of people. So in its very short life on Broadway, it did have decent audiences. And once the closure was announced, tickets for the handful of remaining performances were like gold dust. But the early sales were slow, and combined with those mocking reviews, it seemed like Fritz Kurtz panicked, closing the show instantly in an attempt to salvage what investment he could.

[1:08:06] Dean Pitchford: The impact of Carrie's early closure was felt far and wide. Financially, all of the $8 million gathered by Fritz was lost. 3 million of his own money, and the rest from associates he had convinced to invest in the show. I mean, that's an awkward branch, isn't it? The RSC, though, didn't lose out financially. It made £250,000 from the run in Stratford, and was set to take a slice of the profits from Broadway had the show been successful. But from a reputational perspective, the naysayers in the British press had been proven right. The company wouldn't produce another successful musical until Matilda over 20 years later. Turns out the RSC is drawn to musicals about girls who can move things with their minds. That's actually an excellent origin story.

[1:08:48] Dean Pitchford: And what about Terry Hands? When the Telegraph magazine asked him about the show later that year, he said, Should it have been taken off? My answer has to be no. I do not believe you should take off a show that has 75 to 100% stunning ovations. All my RSC training was saying, you don't do it. But for now, at least, it was the end of the line for Carrie the Musical. Within days, the Virginia Theatre was stripped of the set, and there was no trace that this disastrous production had ever graced its stage. It's said that even now, late at night in the silent auditorium, if you listen very carefully, you can still hear the quiet echo of Charlotte d'Amboise screaming, I just call a stupid bitch. But of course, Carrie's story doesn't end there. Like all good horror stories, there is always a chance to come back from the dead. Like a hand reaching up from the grave.

[1:09:37] Chris Adams: Exactly like that. But before that, we're going to be diving back into the Broadway show and asking, Where did Carrie go so wrong?

[1:09:46] Holly Morgan: The songs?

[1:09:48] Chris Adams: And then they changed it to this rap where we're going to kill the pig, pig, pig, kill him now. Get the blood, blood, blood, ooh, blood. And we're going, why? The blood. There's a little pool of blood on the stage. And all of those phenomenal white walls that need to now be soaking red are still white. Are you serious? Are you serious? You're one moment. Lindsay just said, could you not just throw a bucket of blood on me?

[1:10:25] Sally Ann Triplett: The costumes. You know, it was, you know, we used to bloody wear big shoulder pads and big hair and it was a bad fashion. You know, fashion wasn't great at the time. We got chucked a load of flesh colored bra and knickers that they bought at Debenhams. And Charlotte, who played Chris, was in red and everybody else was in very revealing S&M looking black leather, which wasn't American high school.

[1:10:57] Chris Adams: And we'll be checking in once again with our original cast members to find out how Carrie changed their lives.

[1:11:04] Sally Ann Triplett: It was the one show that when we actually came back and went for auditions, they'd just stop you and go, can you tell me about Carrie? It was it was something that, you know, I will certainly cherish for the rest of my life.

[1:11:18] Chris Adams: It's all still to come on Out For Blood.

[1:11:22] Holly Morgan: Out For Blood is a proud member of the Broadway Podcast Network. For more information about us and the podcast, please visit us online at bpn.fm slash Out For Blood. If you enjoyed Out For Blood, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you download it from. And don't forget to subscribe. If you're a fan of Carrie, we've been posting tons of behind the scenes photos, videos and lots more on our socials. You can find us at Out For Blood podcast over on Instagram and Facebook and Out For Blood pod on Twitter.

[1:11:51] Holly Morgan: Out For Blood was hosted and produced by me, Holly Morgan.

[1:11:54] Chris Adams: And me, the world according to Chris Adams.

[1:11:56] Holly Morgan: Sound engineering and editing by Tom Moores.

[1:11:58] Chris Adams: Paddy Jervis is our audio consultants.

[1:12:00] Holly Morgan: Original music by Odin Ornhill-Marson and artwork by Rebecca Pitt. Thanks this week to Dean Pitchford, Lindsay Hateley, Sally-Ann Triplett, Charlotte d'Amboise, Georgia Otterson, Michelle DeVernay, Shelley Hodgson, Suzanne Thomas, Joey McNeely, Kenny Linden, Eric Gilliam, Michelle Nelson Mann, Audra Levine and Jeremy Sturt.

[1:12:18] Chris Adams: And our audience members, Mark Silver, Mark Shenton, Kim Criswell, Kate Moorer Ryan, Scott Briefer, Stafford Arima, Peter Michael Marino and Stephen Dolginoff.

[1:12:27] Holly Morgan: Stephen Dolginoff is the award winning writer, composer of the musical Thrill Me, The Leopold and Loeb Story. Check out his work at stephendolginoff.com.

[1:12:36] Chris Adams: Peter Michael Marino wrote the musical Desperately Seeking Susan and the follow-up stand-up show Desperately Seeking The Exit. We'll be hearing more from him soon. He's been entertaining kids and grown-ups throughout the pandemic with his online spectacular Show Up Kids at showuptheshow.com.

[1:12:50] Holly Morgan: And a big thanks to Joe Iconis who read that incredible letter at the start of the show. It was sent by a very disappointed audience member after the first Broadway preview and a copy was given to us by a cast member. I think it just shows how much this musical divided opinions. Links to all of that and more in our show notes. We'll see you next week.

[1:13:10] Chris Adams: Tom.

[1:13:11] Holly Morgan: What?

[1:13:12] Chris Adams: They'll make fun of you.

[1:13:13] Holly Morgan: They will break your heart.

[1:13:14] Chris Adams: Then they'll laugh at you.

[1:13:15] Holly Morgan: Watching you fall apart.

[1:13:16] Chris Adams: Please leave me alone.