One of my favorite things of all time is "Carrie: The Musical"

I've never seen it, heard a song from it (beyond humming it in my head from print) and I've seen very few pictures of it but the legend is just amazing.

It was probably the biggest flop on Broadway having only 5 actual shows and something like 20 performances.

The reason maybe I like this concept of the superbomb best is the fact that someone ever thought it was a good idea to begin with. What the fuck? What a terrible idea. This wasn't a "wha' happen?" flop like "Chess" by half of Abba or anything like that. It was just bad bad shit.

Admittedly a lot of cultural product surrounding Stephen King interests me. He's practically the Dickens of our era simply based on his output and popularity and feverish fans. Oh and his penchant for boring sidetracks, exposition, and making sure every book encapsulates the exact time period in which it is set by painstakingly going over every strange small detail in the story.

Now, I personally haven't read most of his books. The ones I have were a mixed bag. Some of them wildly predictable or boring. Few of them really quite ingenious. But mostly I care about the movies and telefilms produced surrounding these stories. He's willing to have any novel translated to film, so much so that he will give anyone the rights to anything he's written for a dollar, thus the huge amounts of so-called "dollar baby" short films produced of his works. The movies though really tend to interest me because his really good works are usually kind of intangible in their scariness and are almost impossible to capture on film. Kubrick did it best with his reliance on non-sensical creepiness in "The Shining". Ironically though King hated this adaptation the most for chopping up his work and excluding a lot of the focus on alcoholism and thus making him produce the telefilm starring the guy from "Wings" (which is incidentally not so bad). Some movies are good because they are based on the books that are more straightforward (mostly from his cocaine fueled days) movies like "Cujo" and "Creepshow". Mostly though, his intangible sense of scariness and the grotesque is impossible to capture on film as seen in such idiocy as "Salem's Lot", "It" (though Tim Curry scarred us all for life, really watch it again , it's shit), any of the Pet cemeteries and arguably (though maybe just because it's aged poorly) "Carrie" itself. Though it is well acted, has some awesome sound design and visuals... The cheesy humor outweighs most of the scary stuff. Except maybe the ending.

anyway, the fact that someone thought it was a good idea to make a musical of it was retarded. The movie was successful, sure, but musical? MUSICAL? Phantom and Sweeney Todd are about as far as the musical genre stretches horror wise. Wow. I just want to meet the producer who funded it. It got a big release. People didn't seem to anticipate it would suck. That also amazed me. It was seemingly totally accepted by Broadway. Regalia and what have you. It even got the above pictured classic Al Hirschfeld drawing in the New Yorker to commemorate it's release.

Its just amazing that things that bad can still find their way to be made. It simultaneously disgusts me and gives me hope.

I don't know why it obsesses me. Its just so strange. Stephen King, you are a strange man. You love movies but will never let anyone make an action figure of your movie. Loving one cultural product...Hating another. Strange.

Oh yeah, if you didn't know, I know a lot about musical theatre.

watch out

CAM

p.s. I promise to post photos of Richmond night market soon too