'Mother' Revisits Her Daughter 'Carrie'!

[MamasDoin'Fine]

Posted: 2/14/12 at 9:40am

When the lights went down at the end of the first Broadway preview of “Carrie,” on April 28, 1988, the actress Betty Buckley recalled hearing something she had never experienced in her 20 years in theater: Boos from the audience.
Ms. Buckley, who had won a Tony Award in 1983 for “Cats,” played the fanatically religious mother Margaret White in the musical, and her character had just been killed by the telekinetic powers of her daughter, the title character.

Both Ms. Buckley and Linzi Hateley, who played Carrie, lay on the stage in the dark, hearing the boos; Ms. Buckley recalled that Ms. Hateley, making her Broadway debut, whispered, “What do we do?”
“We get up,” Ms. Buckley said in reply. They stood, the lights came on, and the boos turned to cheers and applause for the performers in the show, which would go on to close after 21 performances, one of the biggest flops in Broadway history.

On Friday night, Ms. Buckley was among those in the audience applauding the new Off Broadway run of “Carrie,” a heavily revised production that is as earnest and sparely staged as the Broadway version was campy and laden with special effects.
Afterward Ms. Buckley congratulated the cast, which includes Marin Mazzie as Margaret and Molly Ranson as Carrie.

Ms. Buckley said that she “completely enjoyed” the new production, which opens officially on March 1st, and was especially thrilled for the creators of “Carrie,” both then and now – the composer Michael Gore; the lyricist Dean Pitchford; and the book writer, Lawrence D. Cohen.
“I always felt their work in this show was ahead of its time, really provocative and very passionate theater,” Ms. Buckley said. “I’m really proud of the work we did back then, and I’m a huge fan of these guys. I always wanted the score and the story to be seen for its intensely, emotionally moving qualities, and I think you can see those qualities in this production.”

The major difference between the new “Carrie” and the Broadway production, in Ms. Buckley’s view, is that the current director, Stafford Arima, has created a “homogeneity” in tone, design, and performance that makes for “focused, consistent, understandable storytelling.”
“The problem with the original production,” she continued, “was that the directorial concept was very abstract, and the director Terry Hands thought the piece resonated as Jacobean drama. He achieved that through some very, very bloody scenes. Linzi and I presented a psychologically accurate portrayal of a deeply, emotionally disturbed mother and daughter.”

Ms. Buckley described the Off Broadway revival as “the PG-13 version of the original,” then added: “I would love this production to be more dangerous. I think that’s what we had going on that made it resonate for all these years. It’s not about adding camp to this production, but about adding even more truth. The show is perfectly timed right now, because we’re so aware of the sort of bullying in schools that Carrie experiences.”

Ms. Buckley, who performs her cabaret show regularly in New York, caused a mini-sensation on Twitter recently over her comments criticizing one of the judges on “American Idol,” Randy Jackson, for deriding some contestants for sounding “too Broadway.” Ms. Buckley – who wrote, among other things, “Unacceptable level of ignorant arrogance based on nothing! Cut it out!” – said she was sticking up for Broadway artists as well as warning that no one can “lay down the formula of what elements combine to touch our hearts.”

“I, for one, would wish the judges of ‘Idol’ would just say, ‘it doesn’t work for me or it is not to my taste,’ ” Ms. Buckley said. “I wish the judges would not relegate a voice they do not like or respond to as ‘too Broadway.’ It denigrates an art form that is diverse and encompassing of many styles of music and voices. Broadway is a place, not a style of singing or a specific kind of musical composition.”



Updated On: 2/14/12 at 09:40 AM