Carrie Souvenir Program '88

With over 20 titles to his credit, some written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, an incredible 60 million copies sold worldwide, translated into all of the major languages, Stephen King is probably the most successful writer of popular fiction ever -- the publishing success story of the last decade. And yet his meteoric rise to fame reads like a novel itself.

Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, he discovered early on the thrill of science fiction and fantasy in old books by writers like HP Lovecraft and soon began scribbling his own short stories, which he used to print on an old machine of his brother's and sell to schoolfriends. By the time he graduated from the University of Maine in 1972, he was contributing stories to men's magazines like Cavalier, earning a meagre [sic] living and enduring the kind of hand-to-mouth existence familiar to all struggling writers. The following year he took a job teaching English at Hampden Academy in Maine and with his wife Tabitha and their first child moved into a trailer not far from the college. In between teaching, in the furnace room of the trailer, King continued to pour out words.

By 1972 he had a second child, over 2000 pages of unpublished manuscript and a heap of publishers' rejection slips -- and a serious financial problem. One day Tabitha King fished out of the waste-paper basket yet more discarded pages of manuscript.

"The summer before, I had written a short story called Carrie. I thought it would make a Cavalier [Magazine] story; a straight point-to-point tale of an ugly duckling girl with the 'wild talent' of telekinesis, who finally uses her talent to get even with the bitches in her phys ed call who had been tormenting her."

"The story had so many strikes against it from the very beginning that it never should have been written at all. The first problem had occurred about an hour after I sat down and began writing. I decided I couldn't write it at all. I was in a totally foreign environment -- a girl's shower room -- and writing about teenage girls. I felt completely at sea... I crumpled up my two pages and threw them in the kitchen wastebasket. About an hour later, Tabby saw them there, fished them out, read them and pressed me to go on... So I went on with the story, mostly to please Tabby, who was amused to find her husband hopelessly mired in the sociological peer-dance of the adolescent girl."

After it was finished, Tabitha pushed her still unwilling husband ("convinced that I'd written the world's all-time loser") to send it to a publisher. The rest, as they say, it history. Doubleday bought Carrie in 1973, for an advance of $2,500: some weeks later King heard that New American Library had bought the paperback rights for what seemed to him like a staggering amount of money: $400,000.

Carrie is the story of a teenaged ugly duckling, a fractured fairy tale.

Carrie White is seventeen years old, trapped between childhood and womanhood, and caught up in the ageless battle between identity and her mother's beliefs and experience. She can find comfort and understanding neither in the home nor in the 'ant farm' microcosm of high school.... Carrie's ostracization at school is inevitable, not simply because of her appearance and upbringing, but because of the nature of high school itself.

Carrie is alone, awkward, different. No one befriends her -- no one seems to understand her, to be able to communicate with her. She's the victim of the mindless, almost unfocused, hatred of her peers. Even her body is alien to her, undergoing its strange transformations toward womanhood -- and toward something more. She is telekinetic, gifted (or damned) by a genetic mutation -- the ability to move objects merely by thought. Her belated first menstruation intensifies the power, brining it within her conscious control.

________________________________________________________________

Cast/Crew Quotes

Carrie makes history as the first truly Anglo-American enterprise! The Royal Shakespeare Company has achieved a unique arrangement with Equity, enabling us to bring together a cast made up equally of American and English actors and dancers, many of whom have never been in each other's countries before. It brings New Yorkers and Californians to Stratford-Upon Avon, and it will take Londoners and Liverpudlians to Broadway... It also has an American choreographer, and English director, one Swedish orchestrator, and a lyricist from Hawaii...

Shelley

The American dancers were certainly more 'verbal' to begin with, they tended to make more noise in class, psyching themselves up. We English were more restrained, but I think it's rubbing off on us! Once we're all on stage, you won't be able to tell the difference. And this is historic, this company -- how the hell would an ordinary English dancer like me get to Broadway?

-- Michelle Hodgson

Cath

It's a hard show physically, trying to build yourself up to it. And I couldn't believe at first that we were really going to Broadway -- I thought it was just a line to get people interested in the auditions!

--Catherine Coffey

Michele

Working with an American choreographer is certainly different; there's more enthusiasm. I've never done a stage musical before, I've mainly worked on television, so it's fascinating for me to see the progression as the show comes together through rehearsals. It's good to have that much more time to work on something.

-- Michele du Verney

Paul

I think we expected the American dancers to be more outgoing, and they were, but I'm fairly extrovert myself so their style really suits me -- they go full out right from the start. I think we've all gained a lot from this contact. In England, people tend to pigeon-hole you as an actor or a dancer, and they're surprised when you can do both. In the States, they expect you to do the lot!

--Paul Gyngell

David

Once we're all working together, we forget how famous Gene and Debbie are! This is a very collaborative way of working. If one of us is doing a movement differently, Debbie will maybe adapt it for the rest. In a piece like Crackerjack [Out for Blood], it changes all the time -- lots of trial and error. It's great to be playing a real character too, not just a chorus line.

--David Danns

Scott

Is this different from other shows? Well, I've worked with Trevor Nunn and Gillian Lynne on Cats, so you could say I'm used to the English style and English directors... Actually, England and New York are not that dissimilar -- Los Angeles is much more different from either of them in what people want of you.

--Scott Wise

Christopher

This is my first time in England, my first Broadway show, and my first time working with Debbie. Where I came from, in California, dance is rather more jazz-based, more stylized, so this is good to do. It's great, too, to have the challenge of working up a new show from scratch; I've always liked to have a goal to work towards, even before I was an actor, when I wanted to be a baseball player...

--Christopher Solari

Matthew

I didn't start dancing 'til I was 18, although I'd been acting since I was 12. Somebody saw me in movement class -- fencing and so on -- and suggested I take up dancing. So here I am! This is good, working with a big group of dancers who are all thinking on the same lines -- we get such a lot done. And I'd worked with Debbie before, on Fame, so I know what she expects of us.

--Matthew Dickens

Rose

What I like about this show is that the girls are really highlighted for a change. That doesn't always happen...

--Rosemarie Jackson

Gene

I think we started out feeling very conscious of the fact that some of us were American and some English but now we're all dancing we can't tell the difference anymore. I've worked with Debbie for a long time now, but I've never worked with a stage director like Terry before. He gives me a lot of freedom -- Billy, my character, needs to break out and do his own thing -- like I do myself! -- and Terry lets me do that.

--Gene Anthony Ray

Theatre on both sides of the Atlantic benefits from the exchange of artists and companies. This Anglo-American production marks a new and exciting development in this policy. We welcome it.

--Peter Plouviez

General Secretary

British Actors' Equity Association

This production of Carrie, cast equally with British and American actors, is a welcome and significant extension of our exchange policy, which has been progressively successful in bringing the artists of the English-speaking theatre closer together.

--Alan Eisenberg

Executive Secretary

Actors' Equity Association

________________________________________________________________

A Musical of Carrie?

LAWRENCE D. COHEN

Over the past seven years, that's probably the one question the three of us have each been asked more times than you can imagine. Some people -- friends and family included -- couldn't bring themselves to ask it at all, but it was written only too plainly on their faces. The kinder ones looked at us and said 'of course, dear' in that tone of voice you use when you're talking to people who aren't playing with a full deck.

'Ah, a musical of Sister Carrie,' said one producer, 'I love Theodore Dreiser!' Someone else actually thought it was a musical based on the life of Carrie Fisher -- the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and Princess Leia in Star Wars. But most of the time it was 'a musical of what?' followed by a 'very interesting,' a politely glazed smile, and an even faster change of subject.

To tell the truth, it wasn't all that different at the very beginning. In each of its prior lives, Carrie was an uphill battle. The book people didn't think was a book (too short), a lot of movie people didn't think it was a movie, and even after the rights had been optioned and I'd finished a first-draft screenplay, the studio that had bought it pulled out -- announcing they had no intention of making this blasphemous story about blood and menstruation. Even the studio that did make it initially saw it as the lower half on a horror double-bill in drive-ins, and tried to get us to change the title to Pray for Carrie.

The one person who never asked why, appropriately enough, was Stephen King. Shortly after Michael, Dean and I were certain we wanted to do it, I phoned him up at his home in Maine to ask if he would consider granting us the rights to musicalize his first novel. There was a very long pause -- for a moment, I actually thought he'd hung up on me. Then Steve said, "Well, if they could make a musical about a dictator in Argentina or a barber in Fleet Street, I guess this makes a lot of sense. Go ahead, it's a great idea."

Why a musical of Carrie? Honestly because we all thought -- as did Terry Hands and Debbie Allen when they came aboard -- that this was a fascinating piece of material. That this little book that sold over forty million copies and has gone through over fifty printings has done so for good reason: that Stephen King has the uncanny gift of touching our deepest fears and fantasies. That the appeal of this story might be made even more powerful put to music -- and performed as theatre.

And that's what has kept us going over the past seven years -- this extraordinary chameleon of a child and her unforgettable mother, this 'frog among swans' who goes from an outcast to a swan herself -- and then into Cinderella with a vengeance. This amazing original who's like all of us and none of us. This -- Carrie.

--Lawrence D. Cohen

_________________________________________________________

MICHAEL GORE

We had been looking for a piece to musicalize for a long time when, one night almost seven years ago, Larry Cohen and I happened to go and see Alban Berg's Lulu at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. When the performance ended at midnight, I turned to Larry and said, "You know, if Berg were alive today, he would probably be doing Carrie as an opera." We began walking to a restaurant uptown, and some twenty blocks, several bottles of Chianti and a few pots of coffee later, we realized that Carrie should not be an opera for the Met but was instead the very musical we'd been looking for all along. The reasons became only too apparent -- and exciting. Most importantly, the material was emotional. Unlike so many of the extravaganzas that were succeeding on Broadway, Carrie had a very strong story -- almost a mythic plotline -- that people could relate to. As a kid growing up in New York, I was weaned on some of the greatest musicals ever -- Gypsy, West Side Story, Funny Girl and the best of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Carrie offered just the story to provide us with a musical arc from beginning to end. Margaret and Carrie were larger than life characters -- they jumped off the screen (both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie were nominated for Academy Awards for their roles in the motion picture). I knew that first night that this mother and daughter had the emotional weight to give me the kind of pop-operatic music I wanted to write.

Equally important was the high school setting. This was a landscape bursting with intense rhythms, lots of fun and plenty of heat -- a world in which kids could sing and dance as an outgrowth of their inner feelings. In short, the kind of music I've been associated with in projects such as Fame.

The challenge in composing the score for Carrie was to merge the operatic world of this extraordinary mother and daughter with the pop world of the kids. Even that first night the possibilities were thrilling, and the next day I phoned my old friend and lyricist Dean Pitchford.

He was quick to see the same things that excited us: the possibility of a shower ballet for a dozen girls, eachs with different thoughts, musical lines and harmonies; through-composed music for Carrie and Margaret whereby entire scenes could be musicalized; a rock quartet at a drive-in movie; and a second act octet which joins all of our principals and chorus in a final exclamation just as Tommy and Carrie are voted King and Queen of the Prom.

As that first night wore on -- and the next seven years followed -- what sustained us was the richness of the material.

-- Michael Gore

_________________________________________________________

DEAN PITCHFORD

When I was growing up in Hawaii, Broadway seemed light years away. Nothing ever toured our way. God knows, I hounded local record stores for copies of anything from the Great White Way. Those musicals were strange and wonderful creations; for the most part they were comforting and reassuring, fill of homilies and happy endings.

Then one spring while I was in college in Connecticut I took a train to New York City and stood on line with two thousand other non-union hopefuls and auditioned as an understudy in the original company of Godspell. I was cast and, one night, while doing a radio talk show to promote the new rock musical, a listener called to denounce me violently on the air for playing the part of Christ dressed as a clown, microphone in hand, singing a pop-rock score!! I was startled and disturbed, and then, ultimately, titillated by the attack, because I realized that musicals weren't necessarily -- and didn't need to be -- safe.

So when Michael, Larry and I began to discuss the idea of Carrie, my reaction was, "Why not?" But I would be lying if I said that I understood what I was getting myself into.

After all, I thought, what do these characters sing about -- telekinesis, revenge and boyfriends, right? But slowly, as we wrote -- and rewrote and rewrote over the next seven years -- the sensational aspects of this material fell away and the simple strong passions of Stephen King's characters emerged.

The more I lived with them, the more I realized that we've all known these people: the most popular girl on campus, the smiling football player, the baaaad boy. Between Fame, Footloose and Sing (a new musical film presently shooting in Canada) I spent a lot of time in high schools, walking the hallways, sitting in on classes, snooping around in lunchrooms. I eavesdropped, trying to capture the staccato rhythms and the plaintive music of the kids' conversations. I listened for the punchy phrases, the asides that were full of the whoosh of emotion that characterizes adolescence.

For Margaret, I turned back to my own background as a Catholic altar boy and tried to remember the ecstasy and drama that religious music was always able to evoke in me. And Carrie? Every one of us remembers the conversations that we had with ourselves in childhood, those words of consolation and courage that we spoke inside whenever we were ridiculed or overlooked as teams were being chosen. For Carrie's words, I went on a journey of memory, digging around in the past to bring up all of those old and painful exchanges.

It's a long way from Honolulu to Broadway.

--Dean Pitchford

_________________________________________________________

DEBBIE ALLEN