Bittersweet Infamy - #44 - Bloodbath on Broadway

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Guest host Ramón Esquivel tells Josie and Taylor about Broadway's bloodiest flop: the 1988 musical adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Plus: the high-energy story behind the World Wide Web's supposed first photo.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Hi there, Taylor. Hi, Josie. Hey there, Ramon. Hello. Hi. We're so glad you're here. I'm glad to be here. Long time fan, first time caller. Oh, you're not even the first to make that joke. Fran made that joke. That was a nice to Fran. That was a nice to Fran. Yes, you are. I've showed you out before. I think on the show explicitly is my favorite listener. You are the real as fans go. You're the real thing. There's so much content out there.

So you have to pick and choose, right? And so, yeah, this is the one podcast that I listen to consistently, even though I'm a little behind. That's okay. That's all we ever wanted. That's fine. For those who are listening who don't personally know Ramon, let me tell you a little bit about him. Ramon Esquivel is a playwright, theater director, and professor of theater based in San Luis Obispo, California, USA. United States of America. Wow. That's where it is. His plays have been produced in theater schools and universities across North America and around the world. He taught English, history, drama, and creative writing in Washington DC, New York City, Seattle, and Vancouver prior to jumping into teaching in colleges and universities. That is

short, sweet, but damn, it's packed. Yeah, you got a lot in. Look at your life. Look at your life. Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to have, I think, for the first time fellow playwright on the show. I don't know if I wouldn't swear to that. We've had a lot of good writers on the show in the past who may have done plays, but this is a world that Josie and I kind of mutually come from and have spent time in together and both love fondly very much. So it's excited. It's exciting to have the genius playwright Ramon here with us to draw upon. Well, thank you. And I say playwright, but like, dramaturg extraordinaire, let's go. Professor? Or should we be calling you professor? Professor Esquivel? There's some appeal in that, but you can totally call me Ramon. What do your

students call you? Isn't it interesting? I actually asked my students to call me Professor Esquivel, not to be like some jerk, but I tell them this. Universities have historically not been very welcoming of people who look like me. You know, I am a brown, fat, Mexican American man with Yaqui Indian heritage. And so as a way to help students start to see me and people like me as people who can be in these positions of, you know, learning, you know, to say Professor Esquivel, right? I like that. I don't, I mean, I don't, I don't clamp down. I mean, like what? I don't know who Ramon is. I don't try to make a big scene out of that. But you know, I say that and they're like, huh. Yeah, yeah, I get that. I like that too. When I'm talking to colleagues, like I have a

colleague, you know, say, oh, this is Professor Hendricks Boland, you know, because oftentimes people will say like, men, they'll say describe men as professors, but then like the women that are like, oh, this is, this is Susan, right? Professor Basso and Josie, tell me about you, right? Yeah, it happens so often. Because it's also acknowledging it's like, listen, like, we're in the institution. We're all here. We can't deny it. So let's like, let's transform what we can. I like that. So yeah, so I'm just trying to do my bit. Okay, so let me guess. Here's, here's the, here's the Memphis. Here's the Memphis. I'm going to show you to an image. Okay. Ramon, have you, do you recognize this image? I do not. Oh, put it on the Instagram so everyone

can see it. Okay, perfect. So what do you think of it? Describe it for the listeners. What are you looking at? I see four women looking maybe, it looks like they're kind of dressed for kind of high school prom. Okay. I suspect maybe they're more in their 30s, 40s, perhaps beyond, wearing kind of semi-formal dresses. One is bright red, one's like an aqua blue, one is white, one's like a shimmery silver. Yeah. And they're, they're kind of, they're kind of like leaning forward. They're doing a cute little pose. Yeah. And Josie, what of the background of this image? Well, the background is like a light blue, just wash of color, and the words. So that's above, above their heads, above their

hairdos, and like a pink cursive. And it's kind of pixelated. Yes, it's quite pixelated. That'll be owing to the image. So the story behind this image unfolds in Mayeron, Switzerland, near Geneva at a particle research facility called CERN. In English, its name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It's best known as the site of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. You gave a knowing noise there akin to splinter from the Ninja Turtles when you heard about the Large Hadron Collider. Do you have a background in particle physics? I don't have a background other than things that I've read and have potentially scared me a little bit. Yeah, it's a scary thought,

essentially, you know, huge loop. They're blasting particles at each other, so the hopes of these collide and release energy, right? They're attempting to go pretty fusion, right? The energy that's released from combining atoms, right, rather than fission, which is the splitting of atoms. Oh, okay, okay. And there's some concern that perhaps they could open a black hole. But there's always that danger, and you step out the door, right? And there might be a black hole. You might break a glass, that little shirt of glass, that tiny little shirt of glass, tears of fabric in space time, black hole. That's true. You got to live your life. Collider particles, life is too short.

Bring them on, bring on the Hadron Collider. CERN, in addition to being the site of the Large Hadron Collider, it also happens to be the site of the CERN Hadronic Festival. I pulled some info from the still active 1998 festival website, which looks like whatever you're thinking, which enthuses that it's the quote, the one and only chance of admiring the musical talent of the world's top particle physicists. The festival boasts the motto, have fun together to work better together. The story goes that there was a love-lorn secretary whose physicist boyfriend was always choosing his research over her. Classic story, married to the job, right? Married to the collider.

She told this to her co-worker, Michelle Dejanaro, who was the partner of the Hadronic Festival's organizer, Silvano, who seems to like, Silvano seems like he's very much taken on the creative projects at CERN, in addition to his actual work. Well, the idea was the secretary, along with Michelle, the two women, would take the stage at Hadronic to perform a mournful duet ballad called Collider. The song, which was penned by Silvano, tells the tale of a woman whose partner is forever choosing the true object of his affections, colon, the Large Hadron Collider. Sadly, the scientist in question was on shift, so he wasn't at

Cardronic to receive the message. This is like doing Hamlet doing the play, and my plotters is like, sorry, I gotta... I'm on shift tonight, I'm sorry. You know, I'll be there in spirit. Great, you tell me how it is. Yeah, oh my god. Marked maybe on the Facebook invite. But the act was a hit, and so was born the idea of Les Haurives Cernettes, quote, the one and only high-energy rock band. Cute, I get it. The name, which means the horrible Seren girls, was also a pun on the initials of the Large Hadron Collider LHC. Oh, cute. If you know, you know. If you know, you know.

You know, only Seren, Seren-tronic 93 festival attendees know. It's very tongue-in-cheek, the vibe, right? It's like these kind of cheeky, punny, parody songs. The Cernettes feature Michelle DeGenerro and a rotating lineup of singers with Silvano behind music and instrumentation. The lineup reflected in the picture I showed you from left to right is Angela Higny, Michelle DeGenerro, Colette Marks-Nielson and Lynn Verano, which I gather is, you know, the most iconic Cernettes lineup in the way that there's a most iconic Supremes lineup, a most iconic Destiny's Child lineup, etc. But these women are also particle physicists as well, is that correct? They have some connection to Seren, so like

Michelle is a graphic designer working for Seren. Oh, did she graphic design? No, she did. That was, that was Silvano. I fucking, okay, so I know that you can count on me to come in and tell you that every shitty piece of art you look at is good, actually. But this is good art, actually. How dare you? That gentle cyan gradient, the magenta tax. So this is the most iconic lineup that the Cernettes performed for over a decade in under different configurations at the Harderonic Festival, of course, but at other physics events, Nobel Prize parties, the 92 World Expo in Seville. They did the circuit, the whole circuit. They did, oh, the circuit, stop it.

It was good. Are they hiring new Cernettes? We've got a live one, no pun intended. They self-released an album Collider and got press coverage in venues like the New York Times. All the while, the physics nerds in the audience were going bananas, geeking out, like apparently like you, when they were doing the Nobel Prize party, they'd like sing happy, it would be some old man in the crowd's birthday and they'd sing happy birthday to him. And that was that. You know, like the Ceren crowds, the particle physics crowds, the Nobel scholars, they cannot get enough of the Cernettes. Their witty wordplay, their old school, shtick, their smooth jams, and their cheeky staging, said Silvano DiGinaro to Heather McCabe

of Wired in 1999. They always enter the stage like real 60 stars on a forklift, on a bridge, crane, in a convertible car, or play on top of buildings. They have the hair, clothes, and dance style down and the stages littered with heart-shaped balloons, confetti, snow spray, electronic boards, jump cables, all to act out their songs. Wow. Though the Cernettes sang many charming songs with lyrics about bows and higs, the internet, protons, matter, though works, classic themes. All those classic musical themes, you know, I was going to say when the Supremes did their boss on Higgs album, but I think Bjork might have actually done it. While they sang all these songs, the most impactful was their first so Josie and Ramon.

Here are Les Horyves Cernettes singing arguably their greatest hit, Collider. Looks like we're opening inside the Collider. I think this is midi, midi background. Warm sound. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Slightly overexposed. Yeah. Cannot see his face. They're in a tunnel, man. Well, they chose to be there.

This is like Don Ketchy's song. But she crashed the gateway. Yeah, it's great. I actually, I dig this song. So this lead singer, she is the agreed party? Or, okay. No, she's in the context of the song, yes. But she's not the actual person. In real life, she's, in real life, she's the partner of the guy who runs the festival. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good song. Yeah. I can definitely see like how it fits into the humor of the location too. There's an office 404 and underneath someone's written, office not a fan. Yeah. I like that one too. I haven't seen that. It's cute. That's good.

So that's a little brief on the, on the cernettes. But before I catch you up, why don't you, I want you to look back at that image again, the one that I sent you, the album cover, look in one. So I know you're thinking, and because I can read your minds, I'm an empath, basically. Just, just, just stare into this image, ponder this image. I know you're sitting there saying, Taylor, these women are lovely. That song was great. I love quarks, but why are you telling me any of this? What if I told you that the image that you're looking at right now was the first photo ever published on the internet?

I literally almost fell over. Holy shit. Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, big asterisk. So back in the day, when I first encountered this image, the mythology was that it was the first image on the internet. The truth, since then, I'm hearing muddier things. The truth requires a bit of a finer grain, but here's the story. Before one of their concerts, Sylvano had the girls post together offstage for a group shot. He was in his sarin office, tinkering with the gift, trying to remove the background to make it into an album cover. When in walked, Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the facility

on his own project, inventing the worldwide web. Naturally, Lee saw the image and told Sylvano, you should make the sarinettes a website. Sylvano barely knew what the web was, but he pulled together a little web page for the social activities at Sarin, with the image of the sarinettes resting proudly atop the music page. The image was 120 by 50 pixels, the size of a stamp, and you had to click on a button to make it appear, and it took one minute to load on your screen. As to whether it's the actual factual first pick on the internet, the answer seems to be no with a but. The legend around it is that it's the first ever picture, says Rose Everath in BBC, although this photo of the sarinettes is commonly called the first photograph uploaded to the internet

that's not completely accurate. For starters, the internet existed before the web, so the web is like a software platform on which we access the internet. I didn't know that either until I looked it up for this because I was like, what's the difference? As the web was built for physicists to share data, that data often included scientific images. There were loads of images already on the web long before the sarinettes photograph made its way there, but the photo of the four women is the first non-technical picture uploaded to the web. The first picture that was simply a photo for fun, not work. I love that. Yeah, the way that Sylvano puts it that I really like is it was the photo that opened the web to life. This is their like minor claim to fame, outside of just being

this like sarin house band that performed at expo and did the Nobel shows and whatever, they are the subjects of the first photo quote-unquote ever published on the web. So what happened to Les Oribes Cernettes? The band performed until July 2012 when they formally disbanded after a final performance, individual members including Angela Higny and Quebec's Lynn Verano pursuing music careers. Oh, wow. Everyone in this band can sing like they're doing jokey songs, but they're all talented musicians. Yeah, they all have. They can back it up. On July 15th, 2017, they performed a one-time only concert in Geneva to mark the 25th anniversary of their iconic group photo, the one you're looking at now. And in May 2020, at the height of the

COVID-19 pandemic, it was correctly decided that in order to heal, the world needed the Cernettes. On the terrace for my house and my butt, I'm feeling kind of lonely and a little bit blue. And I'm talking to the monkeys because the internet's doomed. Gonna try to zoom the girls I thought to try to connect. So we're scattered around the world. We are still the Cernettes. We'll do the lockdown. And we're fooling around. We'll do the lockdown. It's a new thing in town. We'll do the lockdown. Keep our feet on the ground. Yeah, the lockdown's gonna spin it, spin it, spin it around. Cool. All right. So hello, everybody. I am a theater maker. I'm a playwright. I'm a director.

I'm a dramaturg. I'm an actor. All of this stuff. I'm also a theater educator. I love to like help young people, even older people, like make theater themselves. But I will say that before all of that, I am a theater lover. And my favorite way to pass the time like is literally I like to go get coffee with like a friend. We go see a show. We get dinner after and we just talk about what we see. Like that is a perfect feeling for me. There's a certain strain of theater lover who is fascinated with theatrical failures. These are the productions that, for one reason or another, do not quite achieve their potential. Maybe they are miscast. Maybe the production elements don't all jive together. Yeah. But the storytelling doesn't work. And oftentimes it doesn't work,

and it's not unlawful in trying to achieve that. No, not unlawful. Right. But I will say, I think... That means laughable, Ramone. I'm trying to approach this in a roundabout way. Fair enough. You're being very gentle. Yes. But I will say that I think that, you know, these flop aficionados, it really comes from a deep love of theater. There's this desire to witness this show, kind of knowing that this thing is not going to last very long. And in a way, going and taking this in is a way to acknowledge all the hard work that the actors and the director and everyone who worked very, very hard put into this. And of course, there's a big part of it that's having the story to say, oh, you've heard of that show? Well, guess what? I saw it. Okay. So, put me out of my misery, Ramone.

What's the show? Well, we'll get it. We'll get it there. Prime and the Palm. Yes, you got to prime the palm. Because, you know, there's, in Broadway history at least, there's certainly a number of shows that qualify as flops. There was Breakfast at Tiffany's, a musical adaptation of the novella by Truman Capote, also the film, right, that first was created as called Holy Go Lightly, the name of the main character. It starred Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain in their prime. It opened and actually, that's not true. It never opened. It actually closed in previews. If you don't know what a preview is, these are when they actually present the play for a paying audience, but they're still kind of tweaking some things. So when they have the

official opening, which is really when the critics come, it hopefully ironed out the kinks. It's also if your play happens to have a lot of kinks or be chronically plagued by kinks, kinky, you're now, if you got a kinky play, it is being exhibited before the public, right, independent of critics. There is a way for stuff to get out that like, this is shaping up Trainwrecky, boys. Let's huddle up. Oh, absolutely. Right. And I think that buzz, you know, it can certainly be positive. People say, hey, oh yeah, they got to figure out a few things, but it's great. The score is great. The forms are great. Go see it. Right. Even before. Good Bones. Good Bones. Right. So Breakfast at Tiffany's did not even make opening night. The producers realized that this was unsalivageable. They closed

it during previews in 1966. I think the thought was, you know, they have to, the way kind of Broadway financing works is you go deep in debt, right, with the anticipation that ticket sales and, you know, promotions eventually will start to pay off that debt, right? So you're always financing these things with debt, right? And it says something, if you think there's no way we are going to be paying this debt back. So let's cut our losses now so that we don't have to, you know, pay rent on the theater. We don't have to pay our acres and everything. Then let's just get out now. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Or besmirch our names because I'm sure if it's like a real doozy of a flop, you could maybe make some money on it in terms of cult status. Sure. But

you'll never work again. Yeah. But you'll never work. And that's a big question because I don't think you can, it's really hard to write a cult classic, right? Like nobody sets out to write something that is, that is appreciated by a small group of people. I mean, on Broadway, they want it to make as much as, as much money as they can. So breakthroughs on Tiffany's failed in 1966. 1981, there was Merrily Rollalong, which was by Broadway giants Stephen Sondheim, wrote the music and lyrics. Harold Prince directed, the two of them had just collaborated on a huge hit called Sweet Utah, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Yeah. 1981, Harold Prince's wife had the idea to say, Hey, Harold, you should make a show with teenagers. So the first production of Merrily

Rollalong, which is about this group of friends, it starts at the end of their friendship, essentially, when they're adults. Oh my God, I've seen this fucking yeah, yeah. It starts at the end of their friendship. And then as the play moves forward, we actually go back in time and it ends with them as young idealistic people who were just feeling they can take on the world. That's a beautiful song at the end, but it's heartbreaking, because you know what happens to them. It's actually a beautiful score. It gets produced now quite frequently. That first Friday production featured a cast of high school students and college students, because they really wanted to bring that high school energy. Dude, good. I like the instinct, honestly. Good instinct. There's college and high school

students. You can make a go with that. In theory, yes. It's not just that. You need good casting. You need a good score. You need all these things. Right, right. You can't just have teenagers. That's not how it goes. And I think it was that youthful exuberance that first brought Sondheim and Prince to the project. When it opened, there were not a lot of people who were willing to pay Broadway-level prices to see high school students. Again, the show, it's a Sondheim show, so it's a very sophisticated show, and the actors didn't quite grasp kind of what they were doing. They weren't up to the material. Yeah, especially, you know, they did the young people at the end, really great, but you know, the characters grow into their 40s by the end of the show, and

they weren't quite pulling it off, right? But interesting, that first Broadway production in Mary Roll Along, which had 52 previews, which is a long time to work out kinks, it actually won for every week of the year. It actually only had 18 performances, and then they pulled the plug on that because the critics were unkind. Oh, no. The creators, Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince, actually stopped working with each other after Mary Roll Along for a solid 20 years because it was such a bad experience. Oh, no, because of the play? Because, yeah, I think it kind of fractured their relationship. They did work together again for a show that became called Sideshow, and that one never made it to Broadway. Did it never occur to them, the irony, though,

given the content of Mary Roll Along, that this should be the thing to fracture their friendship? Taylor, you have struck the name on the, you, you, very insightful. Thank you. Very insightful. I was getting to theater. Did you pay attention to your own show, you know? No, listen, the medium is the message, bitch. Don't break up your friendship over dumb shit. But this idea, actually, you bring up a really important point. This idea of egos clashing, this is kind of going to be a common theme for what we're talking about today, right? I want to jump forward to 2011. Great year. This is one that I did see myself. This is Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark. A legend. A legend. A legend in flop Broadway. Josie,

are you familiar with Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark? Give me the deets. So Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark was a huge adaptation of your friendly neighborhood, Spider-Man. Oh, that's Spider-Man. Got you. I'm on the same page now. Directed by Julie Tamor, who had a huge smash success with Disney's Lion King on Broadway. Brilliant, brilliant director. And so the thought was, oh my gosh, Julie Tamor will do something really cool with it. Writing the music and lyrics, or two people who were new to Broadway, Bono and The Edge of U2. So, so I did see this show. It had a record 182 previews before it officially opened to critics. I saw one of these early previews and it had notoriously early on because people were actually getting hurt, right? It

featured acrobatics, it featured all these moving pieces, like actors were breaking bones and things like that. So, and so they would literally have to stop the show and like restart it and make sure they'd have to redesign the show to make them safer, right? Yeah, because it was a lot of like, it was like an action movie. It was like dangerous stunt work and the actors were doing, the actors were doing their own stunts, right? Yes and no. Like there was Reeve Carney play Peter Parker, right? But there were also like eight other people who played acrobatic Spider-Man to make them some community. Who could also get injured. Who could also get injured, right? So the night I saw it. Oh my god, did you catch a piece of photoshop? Okay. What I saw, I saw it when

it still had this group of people called the geek chorus. Get it? The geek chorus. Yes, I remember this. The geek chorus. They were eventually cut before the show opened officially months later. And when I saw it, nobody got hurt. Nobody got hurt. That's so fun. But I mean, I'm not being, I'm not being morbid. Nobody died, but. Yeah, nobody actually died in this production. It's important to state that, right? So the night I saw it, nobody got hurt, but it was difficult to enjoy the show because you were expecting somebody to get hurt at any moment, right? And so it's kind of hard to be like, this is, this is fine. Just be really like tense and stressed out, right? Yeah. Yeah. A friend of mine who were there the same night, they were sitting up in the balcony

and where I was in the orchestra, like Spider-Man was sort of like flying over a headache. Whoa, it was actually kind of cool, right? But you could, you could see all the wires and everything. I was talking to my friend at the intermission. He said, yeah, like when Spider-Man did that entrance, like the actor came on like 10 minutes early and they were putting all these, you know, all the They were there hooking him up to his pulleys. All the pulleys, you know, making sure everything was safe and he was just standing there at the front of the balcony, like fully blocking people's views. Oh no. And then like two other Spider-Man doing the same thing. Peter, put your head down. Oh no, there's only once you can't show the audience the many Spider-Man.

I'm ruining the illusion. Right. But I think they had to do that to be safe. Yeah. But at that point, you need to rethink your approach. Taylor, that idea, I think we need to rethink our approach. It seems like a very simple idea, but some people have a hard time with it. It's a very, it's a very hard time to think when that train gets going. Kill your darlings. Right. So Spider-Man, Spider-Man turned off the dark, officially opened, and actually ended up running for 1,066 performances. So a good decent run. Okay. It cost $75 million to make. Jesus Christ. It made about $15 million, which means that like, like they made, they recouped and then $15 million on top kind of thing. No. Lost $60 million. That's a lot. Oh no.

Turn off the damage here, man. That's tough. One more on mention, then I'll get to the heart of what I really want to say. So Diana, the musical, I don't know if you're familiar with this, this is a play that just opened last year. Yes, it is a musical by Princess Diana. She's having a little resurgence over here. She's having resurgence. Yeah. She's getting everyone ready for her comeback. Yeah. That's what it is. That's it. Yeah. So Diana, the musical, is basically two guys from Jersey, like doing the Diana story. That's hilarious. The music, the book is by Joe DiPietro. The music is by David Bryan, who is best known as the keyboardist for Bon Jovi. That's a lot of heavy lifting I'm best known for, but no. You might be familiar with

the band called Bon Jovi. Yes, I do know who, but you know what? It's a name to drop that I understand. So it gives me context. He's the keyboard guy. Yes, got it. We have established that I'm looking for a keyboard, so it's fun. Yeah. So Diana musical, essentially it tells the story of Diana, you know, Prince Charles. Prince Charles is charming, but Alas, Charles really loves Camilla, Pepper Balls. I think Netflix filmed it and it was, it's available, you can watch it on Netflix and it generated some buzz, but it's kind of a negative buzz. Yeah. Primarily for one scene in which Diana is sort of sitting next to Charles at some, I think it's like a, some fundraising thing. And Charles had, I mean, Diana has like a fantasy of what if we just all sort of like dancing

in a club, right? And at one point like Charles is like breakdancing and things like that. And so that clip like circulated online and people just thought, what the hell is this? Sounds great. Right. It's funny, like so the show, it opened in San Diego and it was just about to open in Broadway in March, 2020 when the pandemic shut everything down. So its official opening did not until actually just this last fall. So it's flopping. No, it's closed. It had 25 previews and it only ran for 34 performances before they closed. I don't even get out of bed for 34 performances. Yeah. No, it's quite, it's quite sad. But I think something you'll find for, especially Diana in the musicals, certainly may really re-roll along is even these flops developed a

quite passionate fan base, right? I mean, there's people, there are Diana stands, we're just like, God, I miss being able to go to Diana musical. I saw it six times, right? That sort of thing. And I think that energy of the cult, something that was developed a cult classic is certainly evidence of what we're really going to talk about today, which is a show that is perhaps the most infamous of Broadway flops. It opened on Friday, May 12, 1988. Almost. Friday the 13th. Almost. But it isn't. They'd have to wait another year for that. Ran for only three official performances. Officially closed that Sunday, May 14, 1988. It had a creative team that was packed with award winners and produced by one of the most

renowned theater companies in the world. It was based on a famous novel by one of the most successful authors of all time. And yet it still managed to lose all of its $8 million investment. It has been called the flop to end all flops. My friends, we're going to be talking about Carrie, the musical. Whoa, I didn't expect that. Whoa, the musical. How much good. Oh, I love it. Let's go. Okay, so let's get some kind of, let's establish some background. Like, how well do we know Carrie as a story, either the novel, the film? Right. What do we know? Josie, what do you know about Carrie? I know it mainly from the film. 1974 film directed by Brenda Paloma. I think 76

films, excuse me. And who plays Carrie in that? Sissy Spacex. Sissy Spacex. Sissy Spacex. Yeah. So she starts to, as a high schooler, starts to exhibit powers, small town, and some of these powers are pretty destructive. There's a seam where she's at her high school prom and she's getting made fun of and it's horrible and they dump a bucket of pig's blood on her as a fun joke. Kids can be cruel and revs up her powers and she burns down the school. Was that it? All right, let me come in with the edit. Yeah, Taylor, right? Josie did a fine laying out of the plot beats, more or less the main plot beats. Allegory of puberty. I'll just add that. That's you're taking my shit. I'm going with Allegory of puberty. What? Everywhere? Oh no, she's a teenage

girl. Oh my god. I was the first person to figure that out. Okay. So yeah, the deal is she's kind of blossoming into her womanhood quote unquote. She has these antagonistic relations with these mean girls at school who whip tampons at her in the locker room and she's got this really repressive Puritan mother played by Piper Laurie from Twin Peas and she's fantastic and she's this repressive mother who's always enforcing all of these like, God can see when you touch her vagina just whatever you're thinking, right? I forget her deal, but that's the gist of it. And when Carrie finally gets pig blooded at prom, she snaps, she uses her powers for destruction, she gets into a pretty gnarly tangle with her mom to finish the whole thing off. A lot of

nappy, nappy, stabby, stabby if you get my drift. Sorry spoilers. So yeah, both of you kind of have the outlines of the story. It began as a novel, Stephen King's 1974 novel. No, neither of us ever said Stephen King or novel to be clear. We just kind of rambled. So please take us to church. Oh, did you not know the connection to Stephen King? Yes, we did. So it's a novel by Stephen King, 1971. 1974, 1974. I think if you look it, you'll see that it's 1970. Listen to Ramon folks, it's 1974. It was the fourth novel that he wrote, but actually the first one to actually get published, right? And this is important. It's also the first one that he sold the film rights to. He sold the film rights for $1. $500. A little better than that, $2,500. Price's right strategy didn't work.

So the story is that Stephen King had been, you know, trying to make ends meet. He's he and his wife, Tabitha, are living in a trailer. He's apparently writing on a typewriter that's owned by his wife. A woman challenged him to say, Hey, you know, you're running all these masculine stories about death and horror, like, but you never write women. And a very defensive Stephen King says, I can write women. I just never tried. So he tried. And he wrote a story. That's good. But that's good. Yeah, he kind of had this image of a girl who is a teenage girl who is in the shower at school. And she has her first period. And when she screams and not knowing what's going on, the other girls laugh at her, they throw cemetery napkins at her. And in the moment of fright and

panic, a light shatters. How did that happen? So Stephen King like reads what he wrote is just like, no man's magazine is going to publish this, right? Because he had been writing. You couldn't make all his money. Right. Because that's where he was writing his short stories. Right. So Chrome was at a tosses in the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha walked by, opened it up, read it and said, Hey, there's something here you should keep going. Right. So he does and he ends up writing his his novel. This is the first one to get published. He's 26 years old after he sold it for $2,500. And of course, the film will not to be one of the biggest hits of 1976 and still one of the most famous horror films of all time. King said, you know, I'm grateful that I got

that. I know I got paid very little money for what I mentioned was made from this film, but I'm glad it was my first novel I learned from that one. So several ones of course made bang. Right. Good. So the film came out in 1976. This is director Brian Brian De Palma. And I think it's interesting because in the 1970s, there were all these films coming out that were about religion, loss of faith, and the tension and the separation between parents and children. Right. So the decade before we had Rosemary's baby, right? The novel, I-11 novel, and also the 1968 film directed by Roland Polanski. 1973, you had the exorcist, right? William Friedkin's the exorcist, right, about a young girl who is possessed by Satan. Yep. They're in Washington, D.C. possessed by

Satan. That's how it happens one day. Yep. People literally believe like the devil's trying to get the devil carries weight. Yeah, through rock and roll, right, through marijuana, like there's all these gateways through Halloween, through video games, through, yeah, things like that. So I think that, you know, like the exorcist, for example, why it's so scary to me that even though I don't believe in the devil and stuff now, like it was such a big part of my growing up and my formation that in the back of my mind, I'm like, this, this could happen, right? Totally. Oh, yeah. A child could get possessed by the devil, right? So, yeah, so the 70s were kind of really leading into this religious horror nature. And Carrie, Carrie certainly had this as well, right? Taylor

had mentioned this before, but Carrie's mother, Margaret White, Carrie White and Margaret White. Carrie's mother is a religious fanatic. She makes her pray all the time. She makes her, when she when she's misbehaving, when she talks back, she makes Carrie go in a closet where there's religious iconography and she has to be, you know, basically pray, right? And the whole reason why this, this movie starts with Carrie having her, her first period and the shower at school and the kids make fun of her. And the reason why it's so traumatic to Carrie is because she had no clue that this is something that happens to every girl, right? And the gym teacher who's actually played by an actress named Betty Buckley in that 1976 film, she's just like, Carrie, come on,

like, I mean, don't you have, you know, things to take care of? You're 17 years old. And, and Sue, who was like a neighbor who kind of like grew up with Carrie is just like, you know, I know Carrie's mom. I don't think she told Carrie, right? And then the gym teacher feels terrible. So, so that idea of Carrie and her mother is a huge part of this story. And especially this idea of religion. And, and when Carrie starts to experience her powers of telekinesis, right, which is the ability to move objects with your mind, Carrie, of course, thinks that, oh my gosh, my mom's right, like I am this child of the devil. Right. And a big part of her story is realized like, no, this is just part of who I am. And I'm going to use it. This is part of my power. I am just a fierce bitch with magical

power. And if the world isn't ready for that, then they need to get ready. That's the vibe. Okay. So Carrie, the film, 1976 film opens. It was made on a budget of $1.8 million, which was rather substantial for 1976. It's domestic gross, actually domestic and Canada, US and Canada, it made $33.8 million just in that first run. That doesn't even count. Re-releases and things like that. And certainly launched the Carrie White expanded universe, right? Certainly sequels and remakes and things like that. This is an interesting question, though, because I think, you know, Carrie, the novel is written by Stephen King, right? The film was made by Brian De Palma, right? It was written by a man named Lawrence Cullen, Larry Cullen, we're going to come back to you,

dude, right? I think Carrie, The Rage, Carrie II was directed by a man. The first remake was made by a man. It wasn't until 2013's Carrie, when a woman finally, you know, directed the story, Kimberly Pierce. And as we will talk about in Carrie the Musical, it's almost entirely a male creative team telling the story about this young girl. I think now, if people like wrote this novel, if a dude wrote a novel about this teenage girl, and people would be like, what? It would come off a certain way. The OG Carrie does kind of have that whiff about it. I think that it's kind of carried off because Stephen King's a good writer or whatever. It kind of has that weird vibe of like, oh, you want me to write a woman? Okay, what are women? Period. Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean? Period. Mean girl's bully period girl. Dot. Where's Miami? Especially knowing to the background of the story, where a woman comes up like, well, you're writing all these horrors, but like, what about female horror? Like, there's a lot there. Movie is a huge success of Carrie. And so how the hell did it become a musical? Let's talk about a man named Larry Cullen, Lawrence D. Cullen, who was the screenwriter of Carrie, the 1976 film. Okay, okay. Big success. And I think that screenplay is actually excellent. It does a great job of, it follows the book quite closely. You know, you read the book, you see the film and you're like, oh yeah, this is clearly the same. It's the same story. So he

and a good friend of his, a composer named Michael Gore, had been wanting to collaborate on a musical, a piece for the fee. And in 1980, they went to go see an opera called Lulu by an Austrian composer named Albin Berg. It tells the story of Lulu who, and her, it's a young woman's downward spiral from being a kept mistress. And she's thrown out and she eventually finds her way into sex work in the streets of London. Not your typical opera fair, right, even in the 1930s. In 1980, the Metropolitan Opera New York had basically pulled together a completed version of this opera and presented it. And Larry Cullen, who had been screenwriter in Carrie and Michael Gore, the composer, were already sort of looking for inspiration about what

they could do, what was going to be their big show. And after the show, Michael Gore said to Cullen, if Albin Berg were alive today, the project he would be writing as an opera would be Carrie. Yeah, that's what they started. Yeah. So Cullen would later tell the New York Times, I looked at Michael and knew exactly what he meant. Carrie offered an extraordinary relationship between a mother and a daughter who are both larger than life characters. After some more intense discussion, I picked up the phone, called Stephen King at his home, he made and said, we've got an idea, but you'd better sit down before I tell you. When I finished, there was such a long pause that I wondered if you had hung up on me. But then King said, well, I guess if they

could do a musical about a dictator in Argentina, and a murderous barber on Fleet Street, Carrie as a musical makes enormous sense. Go ahead. I don't hate the idea. I think that the idea of a Carrie musical is actually a good one. Yeah, absolutely. So at the time, remember in 1980, so Evita, the music by the dictator was Evita, had opened in 1979, was still a huge hit. Also opening in 1979 was Sweeney Todd, which is also a big hit. It's not only about murder, but it's also about cannibalism, right? There's like a joke song in there about singing about eating different kinds of people. It's great. I love Sweeney Todd. So yeah, so kind of in that context, you're like, yeah, this really makes sense, right? So not only that, but you had the person who wrote that

killer screenplay for the movie, he was going to write the book for this musical, right? If you don't know musical theater parlance, the book of a musical is like the script, right? Oftentimes, the structure, when the songs come in, and also any spoken dialogue in between songs. Michael Gore, the composer, was just coming off composing music for the movie musical Fame, which is about the trials and tribulations of students at the Performing Arts High School in New York City. So Fame, the movie musical came out in 1980. The title song, Fame. Michael Gore wrote the music to that. This isn't an audition, Ramon. We can't go in. I'm going to sing it up. We can't get you. We're going to sing it alive.

It's a musical, you're going to sing. This is the musical episode, you're right. So Michael Gore had won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for writing Fame, and his lyricist, Dean Prichard, also won awards as well. And so there we're going to bring Dean Prichard on board to write the lyrics too, right? The big team. Yeah. This idea hit them in 1980. 1981 is when they started going. Now, I don't know if you remember back in the beginning, I said the show opened on Broadway in 1988. So there's like a seven-year development process of getting this going, right? So Dean Pitchford, who would be the lyricist, right? He actually writes the screenplay to a little known film that came out in 1984 called Footloose. Never heard of it. And he would write the lyrics

to some of the big hits that came out of there, like theme song Footloose with Kenny Loggins. Footloose. Footloose. That's all they got. That's all they got about a Footloose. There we go. Let's hear it for the boy who is recorded by Dean Pitchford. Great song. Oh, yeah. Taylor, do you want to do that one? There you go. Great synthesizers on there. Bonnie Tyler was brought in, you know, rocking Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heartfear. Hold down for Hero. Hold down for Hero. Awesome from Footloose. Dean Prichard brought those lyrics. And of course, the title of the song is Almost Paradise Love Theme from Footloose. That's all we're knocking on heaven's door. That's it. And Wilson and Mike Reno from Loverboy. So fortunately,

you know, that was a huge hit. And so Dean Prichard was doing okay. So also tapping in from the fame group would be Debbie Allen. She would not come in until later in the process, but they brought in Debbie Allen as their choreographer. Debbie Allen had had actually a small role in fame film, a 1980 film. But there was a fame television series from 1982 to 1987. And Debbie Allen played like the dance teacher. And that's the one that everybody knows her from. Yeah, including the famous quote. You've got big dreams. You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat. Oh, fuck. That's fair. You got to sing. You got to dance. Your knees are soda. Your back aches. Your toes are gnarled into hideous claws. And you're 15. Blood equity. 15.

Do you want fame? Well, just so you know, this is what it's going to cost you. I realized that, I feel like I have a lot of memories of fame because the television show. And when I think of the movie, they think of, oh, yeah, that's what happened. And I realized that it actually happened in the television show. And I watched the film fame a couple of years ago. I was just like, I've never seen this movie before. It was all my memories that I associate with the movie were actually from the television. The danger of the remake, right? The danger of the remake, yeah. Did I watch Carry the Musical or did I watch the movie or did I just read the book? I don't know. It all blends together, right? Well, you would have remembered if you saw Carry the Musical.

We haven't even gotten to what's wrong with this thing yet. Yeah. This is still a viable project at this point. It's important for you to understand why so many people believed in this project because again, at first glance, you're like, Carry the Musical. Kind of crazy. No, it passes the sniff test to me. If you think about it, it does, yeah. You have to remember, Ramon, let me tell you something about musical theater. Yes. You have to remember that this is the era of like cats, where you can have a garbage musical about fucking nothing that nobody likes or ever has liked in the history of the planet. Don't tell me you know Andrew Lloyd Webber too. You would. Anyway. But like point being, this is if you look at cats, really break cats down to its core components.

Not a product that caters to broad tastes. Right. Yeah. And I think you make a really good point because as soon as you start to throw logic at, you know, well, we should make some changes, or we should make some adjustments to our show to make it stronger, it can be very easy. We're like, no one is going to care about that. As long as it's big, as long as it's fun, like nobody's going to care. Yeah. Right. And so yeah, that's a really good point. And I bet we're going to talk about the musical spectacles that came out in the 80s too, because that was a big part of what was shaping this disaster. Right. To be clear, I am confident that you know more about musicals than me. I am confident of that as well. Cats the stage musical is really, really great. The film

was an abomination. That's a different episode. So here's some more talent that helped develop Kerry in that seven year period of development. Right. Mike Nichols, the film director of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the Graduate, he'd also directed in New York Theater before, theater in the park. So Mike Nichols was one of the people that was one of the directors, potential directors brought in. And he had this to say after they did a workshop reading, the future of Maureen McGovern, by the way, as Margaret White. Right. Mike Nichols said, boys, you've done great work. It's going to be a great hit. I'm not going to do it. I saw the movie. I didn't want her to go to prom then. I'm hearing it now. I still don't want her to go to prom. Burn up. Wow. He just doesn't

want to put Kerry in that situation. What an ally. Yeah. He's just like, yeah, I'm not going to do that to her. You know prom wasn't that great. Overrated. It's a hallmark of the high school experience. Got one dance in. Don't know why. So the last kind of name director who was brought in with, you know, hopes to generate funds, really, Bob Fosse. Wow. Pippin, Sweet Charity, Cabaret, all that jazz, all that good stuff. He, however, wanted the story to go darker. And he wanted to primarily go darker than the film, darker than the score they've written. And he wanted to primarily tell the story through dance because it's Bob Fosse. Yeah. It's how he communes with the world. Yeah. I will say that I think Gathering Pig Blood seemed directed by Bob Fosse. It would have been

pretty good. Oh my God, red glitter. So yeah. So finally, they find producers who are basically, their job is to like raise the money to actually put this thing. So Fred Zallo and the husband and wife team of Barry Weisler and Fran Weisler, they agreed to fund the project for $5 million with the goal to open on Broadway in two years in 1986. Okay. I think they can do it. So they would eventually find their director in a man named Terry Hans. Terry Hans at the time was the co-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was co-director with Trevor Nunn. In hiring Terry Hans, it seemed like an unusual choice because again, he was best known for Shakespeare, but he brought with it the clout of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the United

Kingdom. But in a sign that the marriage with Terry Hans was doomed from the start, Cohen and Pitchford had seen a production that Hans had directed called Poppy. It was a kind of panto musical about the opium wars that went up at the Barbican in like 84. Everyone's getting real cute with their ideas. Cohen and Pitchford had actually walked out at intermission of that show. So when they heard that the producers wanted them to meet the director of that show, they're like, no way. This is terrible. But again, Terry Hans had just found success in New York with productions of Sooner of the Berger Rock and Much Ado About Nothing. So they're like, okay, we'll take the meeting. So in Cohen's apartment, Hans listens to the tape of that famous 84 workshop and he says,

I had no idea what to expect when I was told about this. I've been offered a dozen shows since I've been in town and this is the one that I'm interested in. All right. Good. Why? Why would he be interested in this? Well, there's some theories. At the time, Terry Hans was co-artist director with Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Trevor Nunn had just had a huge success with a little known musical called Les Miserables. Never heard of it. Which if you don't know, it's an adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel. It was a huge success in London and then in New York and eventually spread around the world. It's still constantly playing, right? RSC had collaborated with producer Cameron McIntosh on that. And even though the RSC had made some money on it, by far,

the big beneficiary of those funds was Cameron McIntosh, right? So the RSC was interested in another big budget show, Les Miserables, but hopefully one that they would keep. Right. They would get a better deal in the contract kind of thing. Right. And maybe there was some competition going on and if Trevor Nunn had had this huge success with the big musical, then maybe Terry Hans could be like, well, you know, I can do it too. Right. Right. Right. So Fran Wessler is one of the producers, spoke to Terry Hans and shared that what she loved most about the idea for Cury was the high school elements. She loved this idea of exploring high school life, that kind of story. Wessler told Hans to think Greece. Oh no. So Josie, what would you think?

If a producer, you're about to direct this big budget musical and director came to you said, hey, I love the high school elements. Think Greece. How would you interpret that? Very like tongue-in-cheek sexuality. Because why? What's the Greece? We're talking about here. I'm thinking of the film, Greece, with John Travolta and Livy and John. And Stalker Channing. Let's not forget Stalker Channing. Oh, never forget Stalker Channing. Never. No, it's constantly about like, did you get far? You know, like, did you guys bang? And it's all about sex. Like tongue-in-cheek way. Did you guys bang? Tell me more. Tell me more. Did you get it in? Tell me more. I mean, the line is, did you get very far? Yeah. Yeah,

because they're P and V. Yeah. Very understandable, you know, because the stage version of Greece came out in 1971, right? Had it closed in 1980. When it closed, it had become the longest-running musical in Broadway history. Right. It was surpassed three years later by a chorus line, but still. And then the musical, the film adaptation hadn't come out in 1978. That was a huge success. Taylor, what would a producer told you to think Greece? Where would you go? A similar direction to what Josie was suggesting I would have done, you know, duck-ass haircuts, like back hair, leather jackets, fuzzy pink sweaters, and goodle skirts, and, you know, sock-hot fucking chin on the Gus. That's what I would do. The fun vibes of Greece, the musical. A classic. Terry Hans, director of the Rail Shakespeare Company,

heard Frank Weisler say, think Greece. He interpreted as think ancient Greece as in Greek tragedy. When he started collaborating with his costume designers, Ralph Cotay and Alexander Reid, they created mock-ups. The high school students were wearing essentially togas. Oh, no. The men were marrying kind of like these leather jackets, but they were kind of like tunic, like the set sort of had a very sort of spare, stark presentation that might not look out of place in an amphitheater in ancient Greece. Oh my god, my face is melting. That is ridiculous. Yeah, it's a really bad misunderstanding. There's so, and there's like another Greece, too. There's like a, there's like a, a super king Greece. Why not go there? You know? That's your issue. Oh my god.

So, Terry Hans, you know, presents these concepts to the producers. The Weislers are just aghast because they're like, what are we looking at? This is antiquity. This is not Greece for one thing, that is certainly not Kerry, the musical, right? And Terry Hans said, well, I really see it as a tragedy, right? And he doubles down and it's just like, this is the direction we're going to go in. So, it wasn't necessarily a miscommunication. He was just hearing what he wanted to hear. I think it probably started as a miscommunication, but once he committed, right, and went all in, you know, you kind of interpret everything through that lens, right? And then once you're went to the vision, right, this is the time of auto directors. It's not about author intent. It's not

my vision, right? He was committed. Is there nobody in the room that says, like, this is on the wrong track? Like, it's way early. But, but someone just did. Somebody did. Somebody just did and he was like, no, you said Greece, but you meant Greece. Come on. Yeah. So, the Weislers at this point are like, we're out. They are all as producers, right? With them. Yeah, money's the paper. They're like, this guy is clearly not the right person for it. But again, he still had the backing of the Royal Shakespeare Company. RSC had already programmed the play into their 1987-1988 season, which was going to be an American works season. So, the creators had to make a choice. Like, okay, either we go with Hans and his sort of institutional backing,

and we say goodbye to the producers or the producers and basically start from scratch, right? Right. Yeah. So, Hans stays in and the Weislers like, all right, see ya. Wow. So, now at the time, they met a German producer named Friedrich Kurtz. So, Kurtz had this and his specialty was bringing Broadway shows and producing them in New York. We'd eventually do this with the founder of the opera and he had done Cats earlier. But again, like there was, it's not quite the same as producing for Broadway itself. So, when he heard this opportunity of this buzzy property around, he's like, this is it. This is my chance. Yeah. Even though he'd never produced it right before Broadway before, he felt he could bring the chops and more importantly, the money to support this

So, the team was in place for Carrie's first iteration in Stratford upon Avon, England in February 1988. Okay. So, casting, right? Who was going to take on these roles? Initially, the creative team wanted to bring on Betty Buckley, right, who had played the gym teacher, Ms. Collins, Ms. Collins, the gym teacher in the 1976 film. She was also a Broadway star. She had won a Tony for playing Grisabella in Cats. Damn. But alas, she was unavailable. And so, instead, they went with an inspired choice, Barbara Cook. I don't know if you know who Barbara Cook is. She was the original Marion the Librarian in The Music Man. Interestingly, she did not play Marion in the film adaptation. That was her friend, Shirley Jones.

But they were fine. Is this, I'm sorry, are we casting for Mama? Margaret White for the Mama. Barbara Cook is kind of no nonsense, right? She has this great critique of the film version of The Music Man, which she says, you know, I was watching that movie. It was too clean. Like, you couldn't smell the shit in that town. Like, if I was going to do it, I want to be able to look around on this. Really, yeah, that town smells like shit. Yeah. So, she's kind of like a no-nonsense person. Now, she had not been in a musical since 1970, so had been about, you know, 17, 18 years, had mostly been recording. But she was like, you know what? This is a chance for me to start anew, you know. It's a leading role on Broadway.

It's a leading role, right? To play Carrie, they cast a woman named Lindsay Haley. When she auditioned, she actually didn't know what she was auditioning for, so she auditioned with On My Own from Les Miserables. She had put on all this makeup to make herself look older. And the casting agent said, hey, can you take off all the makeup and just kind of come back in and show us what you really look like? Lindsay Haley was 17 years old, right? So, when she came in without all the makeup, like, she actually looked like a 17-year-old because she was. And she had this incredible belt for her voice. So, she was cast. Interestingly, this was an unusual production where they made deals with equity on both sides of the ocean. So, 50% of the cast was American, 50% of the cast was British.

Playing the gym teacher, who was named Ms. Gardner. In the book, her name is Ms. Desjardins. They Americanize it to Ms. Gardner. That's hilarious. Darlene Love. Speaking of 1960s bops. Give it to me. Who is she? Yeah, yeah. Probably her best known song is Baby, Please Come Home. Baby, please come home. But her voice was not, she was not credited as recording that. Right. Anyway, she was not really known as an actress. She was just known as this singer of 60s bops, right? Really, really strong. Okay. There was some complaints in the UK about the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was a subsidized theater, using British taxpayer funds to essentially support a Broadway musical. Yeah. On the studio side,

you know, they had just done an adaptation of Victor Hugo, again, high-class French literary, and Stephen King was not thought of as being in the same boat. Is this really what the Royal Shakespeare Company should be? Oh my goodness. Snob, these snobs. They need a bucket of blood. That said, you know, the buzz around the show was enough to basically sell out the run is going to be about a two-run. When the show opened, it was very evident there were some considerable problems. Most notably, when the creators presented their story, it was a book musical, there was a combination of written dialogue and songs that ideally rise out of the emotional moments, right? Musical theaters and expressionist art form. When the music kicks in, it's not

literally that a person starts singing like in a cafe, right? We sort of go into this alternate reality and we start to explore their interior. It's the language of the media. Yeah, exactly. Now, at the time, things like the name is Rob, and Cats, and even Starlight Express were examples of what's called sung through musicals, where there's little to no spoken dialogue, like everything is done through song, right? So that was kind of in vogue at the time. And so Hans had got into his head that, oh, that's how people want to see musicals now. So we essentially cut out most of the written dialogue that Cohen had written into the book. So we just had a mostly sung through piece, right? Now, there's important connective tissue in that dialogue. Here is a story, you know,

like there's conversations between characters to build their rapport. Again, having not really directed the musical before, Hans was really making editing decisions without really thinking about is this what a musical needs to work, right? So that's kind of one of the biggest problems that really arose there. Hans had not really had not attended an American high school. So for those scenes set in American high school, he basically deferred to Debbie Allen. And Debbie Allen was like, well, I made fame. We'll do it like fame. We'll do it like fame. I know teenagers. Oh no. Hans will focus on the Carrie and Margaret White scenes. Okay. The set, as soon as the lights came up, you were looking at essentially what is a white box that has these sort of plastic, maybe

their vinyl screens. And in the gym, when the dancers come out, again, they're wearing sort of like ancient Greece inspired warmups and things like that. It's like they're dancing in the middle of like museum in a strange way. Just plinths. Just why are there plinths? And ultimately, these screens would sort of like rotate out and become other things. But when it opens up, you're like, this does not look like a high school anywhere. It does not look like a real place at all. And so immediately, there's a total clash between what is more of an abstract, suggestive presentation of the high school and the house. And, you know, these songs, which are these girls singing about when they go out with their boyfriends, right? And, you know,

Carrie wanted to be taken seriously. Did he get it in? So, all right, so I think I'm just going to take you to the highlights of the show. And we'll talk about kind of the key moments that were probably. So after that gym class scene, we go to a shot of Carrie, because by herself, she's in a shower. It's a suggested to be a shower. And she's praying to God, right? She says, Dear Lord, nothing I do is ever done right. That's all that I hear. Or, Dear Lord, I'd like to fade into the sunlight and just disappear. So that moment, it's more like she's getting ready, right? And then the other girls come in, these sort of plastic screens come down. They're mostly on the other side of these screens.

But the entire strip of shower rises on hydraulic lifts about maybe eight to 10 feet above the ground. Yeah, I'd have hydraulics back in the day, huh? Yeah. Why? We don't know. Everything just sort of goes up. For me, shower go higher. And it sets there. And then they're dancing to the song called Dream On. And then Carrie screams because she's having her first period. And then the hydraulics come down. There's like literally no reason for that to happen other than like we have it. Josie, as a woman, your men are key. Was that the moment where the hydraulics came down? No, they didn't go down. They went up. Oh, wow. See, that's when they got wrong. They should have been screaming and it should have gone up. You can tell a man wrote it because the hydraulics went down instead of up. Oh, I forgot

to say that Carrie's prayer is interrupted by Chris the bully coming in and saying, Carrie, why eat shit? And then everything falls apart. That's tough when that happens. Yeah. So like what happens in the film and in the book after Carrie comes in screaming, they throw tampons in the center and napkins at her. And Ms. Gardner comes in, darling love is like, what the hell's going on? And, you know, yells at them. And there's a song, of course, called her mother should have told her. Finally, we go to the White House and Carrie's mom is there and she's Margaret is in prayer. She's saying a really beautiful song called Open Your Heart. I'll say that the Carrie Margaret songs are beautiful. Oh, okay. They are beautiful. Interesting. I think they had a great instinct to

really focus on that. It's jarring though, because again, the teenage songs are very poppy and you know, for that first song, they're like, let's give the girl a pad. Because when you're out, it's just the pits you can never win. There's no doubt that life just doesn't begin until you're Yeah. So and then the Margaret and Carrie scenes are a bit more operatic. Again, especially with Barbara Cook singing is this beautiful ethereal voice. And we actually hang out with Carrie and Margaret for a while. Carrie tells Margaret about what happened at school, asking her why she never prepared her for administration, which leads to the song and Eve was weak. That's traumatic. And God made me from Adam's whip and Eve was weak. And Eve was weak. Again, it's a really intense song,

but it's really good. It's very dramatic. Yeah. And at which point, Margaret blames Carrie and says, this is a sign of your wickedness. So after that intense moment, Margaret makes Carrie go, it's a trap door. It's like in the basement. Oh, it's like evil dad. Crams are in there, clothes are there. Oh, I should say the transition from again, high school into the White House, a platform emerges from the back. One of these back panels opens up like a garage door. And then the White House comes out and it's just like a wood panel and a wood panel here and a chair. If somebody can't fall and get injured or get stuck in something, it's not a good play. Yeah. Well, I'm opening night. Apparently, Barbara Cook had an early entrance as that she was on the

platform that comes out. And the white platform that was going up above her nearly like hits her. She like literally had to like duck out. It's dark. Right. And it was just right at the last moment that she saw this thing basically come towards her head. And she like ducked out. But yeah, serious potential for serious injuries. For decapitation. Barbara Cook's gonna remember that. Okay, good. Barbara Cook's gonna remember that, right? So after the Carrie and Margaret scenes, we go back to the rest of the gang. And it's a scene that's set at, I think it's kind of like a lover's lane type place, place where the teens go in their cars. And you have all of these cars, like the hoods and their windshields. But it's like four stories of these cars, like literally like,

I thought it was ancient Greece. They're still wearing their togas and stuff. The boys are wearing leather, black leather. So wait, did he see split the difference and did both greases? I think so. Why would you do that? That might have been a compromise. Okay, okay. I'll give you the boys. I'll give you the boys. So the cars come out like their headlights are blasting the audience, right? And they proceed to do this, this dance. Don't waste the moon. I like that. It's okay. There's just boys and girls talking about chasing each other things like that. Yeah, I guess all these cars have sunroofs because they're all kind of like stepping out dancing behind the windshields that and they're dancing like that cannot. And it's

spectacle past the point of function. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And again, because they're that high, like they can't really do a whole lot of they're kind of just dancing in place. So yeah, I love it. I also like don't waste the moon is like a menstrual illusion. It carries the the car. Hey, carries the theme board. So in the course of the song, if you can hear it, it's again, the dialogue is gone. So you've got to get it from the lyrics. Right. You hear that Chris is still mad at scary white. We meet her boyfriend Billy and Billy just wants to have sex. We go back to the carry house. Carrie is still in the basement. She sings a song called evening prayers. Margaret joins her. You might also have noticed that we haven't really mentioned

Carrie's power yet. Oh, no. The only hint if you don't know the movie that Carrie has telekinetic powers is during that shower scene, a glass breaks off stage. We don't see it. We don't hear it. And then that's it until the end of the first act when Carrie has been asked to the prom by Tommy because Sue asks her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie as a way that she feels bad about this. And Margaret's just like, no, you can't go in carries. It's like, yes, I'm going to go. And it ends with her sitting Margaret's ass down using her power. Literally, she just sits in a chair. What a reveal. And this flame projection comes out from under the apartment. I don't know. The house is not actually on fire, but it's maybe just suggesting that this is the rage that's

coming. Carrie turns around to face the audience at her hands on a flame like the sonnets. And she says, I'm not afraid of you at all. I have nothing left to lose. I have power I can use. But again, you're like fire. Fire starter. Yeah, right. She didn't, she didn't light things up. Well, she did eventually light things on fire, but through. Yeah, she's not shoes. Yes. But she can do other things. Yeah. So we're at the end of act one. We've seen the first hints of Carrie's right. Act two opens up and this is for anyone who decided who didn't leave intermission decided to stick it out. Oh, no. The beginning of act twos when they really start doubting that choice, right? Because it opens on a pig farm. Oh, there's a song called crackerjack. And it's

features Chris and Billy and the boys at this pig farm killing pigs and collecting blood for this prank that Chris wants to do on Carrie. Would you really have to do that? Why not just go to a bookshelves? Are the pigs dancers? The pigs are dancers. Yes. The pigs are dancers. Got it. The boys sort of become the pigs and they come back to boys. There's lots of red light. I'm in there. I'm reading this now. It's in the libretto. They're like, kill the pig, pig, pig. It lasts eight minutes. Oh, it's like an eight minute musical number about pig murder. About pig murder to bring you back. Bring you back. So that's the first thing you see. We cut to the school and people are decorating for prom is weird white box back to back to the

white box. But they're putting some streamers. Sue sings a song called shining star, which is all about her questioning. Oh, did I do the right thing and ask my boyfriend to ask Carrie? But ultimately she's like, no, I did the right thing. Back at the White House, Carrie is making her dress. She is beginning to experiment with her powers. She makes these shoes dance for themselves. She makes her hair brush fly through the air. And eventually she actually dances with her dress. The way it's shot, because I think they use some like black lighting effects on this, like she's way upstage, you know, staging wise, like that's the most disconnected you are from the audience. So like, at a time when we should really be empathizing, I wish she's like, as far

away as possible. She's surrounded by bunraku dancers, manipulating hair brushes. Got you. Margaret comes back in and again begs her to not go. She doesn't reprise of the song. Carrie. Carrie gently refuses and she's like, no, she's going to go with Tommy. He's a nice boy. Left by herself. Margaret sings a really beautiful song called when there's no one. Probably the most beautiful song about a mother resolving to kill her child. But she essentially says, you know, I have to do this to save my daughter. But when she's gone, I won't have anything to live for myself. I'm gonna miss Carrie and her dirty pillows. It's a really beautiful song. At the prom, this song called what a night, W-O-T-T-A. Wow. They're in a better

approximation of what teenagers would wear, you know, to a prom. We really lost grease. We lost grease. Yeah. Kind of vanished other than as wardrobe contrivance occasionally. So we really start to see the impact of cutting all that dialogue because really the first time we see Tommy talking to Carrie is when she shows up at the prom. Oh. And he's literally just like, I really like you, Carrie. Let's dance. And it's like, okay, we care about them and we want them to be happy. Yeah. Very quickly, we go to Carrie getting crowned king and queen, you know, through a bit of mouthpiece by evil Chris. And then we have the famous blood scene, right? You know, we just saw that eight minute dance number. They must have gotten a lot of blood.

Yeah. In rehearsals, when they tried to dump the fake blood on her, it would either short out her microphone or it would make the stage too slippery for the actors and people were sleeping all over the place. So the solution was to have Chris run out with like a glass of blood and just sort of like Oh, my God. And you just sort of see it just like, just sort of see like this like spill coffee. Oh, my God. It's like, it's like on real host lives when Tamra threw the wine at Gina. It's like, you're dashing them with a glass of pigs. Yeah. Like, they took you eight minutes. Yeah. We got a lot of blood for all that blood collecting. Clearly, they could not figure out how to make that work. It's like the centerpiece stage of the entire thing. Yeah. And this is in

your era of like the chandelier comes down at the end. How are you gonna? Exactly. Like the moment that should have had the most theatricality is the one that had the least. Yeah. Yeah. So then we have the destruction. At this point, a for some reason, a scrim drops down. It's like a see-through claw. The lights go to red, fog drifts in, and Carrie starts to sing a recap of her song, Carrie. Still Carrie. So the smoke, you're like, okay, we know that eventually there's fire that started, but it's really to set up the lasers that shoot out from Carrie's platform, like red lasers. Um, you know, you got laser technology, you gotta use it somehow. Exactly. It's 88, 89. Yeah. That's drill play, red lasers. It's not rocket science. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, what's interesting about this choice is in the film, like Carrie kind of like looks around, she's like, right, she's closing the doors. She's, you know, she misses Collins, the gym teacher gets hit by the falling basketball hoop. It's ironic. Yeah. In the book, Carrie actually walks out of the gym and she kind of like looks through the window as everything starts to fall. And the fire is, it's suggested that it's an inheritance, right? It's just once things started going, hey wire. Yeah. Wires fell, people getting electrocuted, right? And in the film too, you get the sense of she just kind of like loses it for a moment and then she like leaves. Yeah, it's like a power surge. Yeah. And then everything kind of starts to fall apart here too. In the musical, Carrie is pointing

out individuals and she's like, oh my God, it's like when Ernest becomes magnetic and Ernest goes to jail and he's just out and shit. That's exactly it. Okay. But that's a really different move story wise. So the final moment of the destruction is when the very slowly the roof seems to collapse, right, kind of starts to lower. But then you realize like what it's actually doing is revealing the piece, the resistance, which is the famous pure white staircase that everybody remembers from Carrie, that everybody remembers. No, it's an iconic piece of the movie. At the end she walks up the marble staircase. It's like, what is this a stairway to heaven? It's a womanhood. Stairs to Olympus, right? So this stairway descends, there's a hole cut out so that Carrie is just sort of

standing there and sort of takes over for her. And again, it goes all the way up to the top and poor Barbara Cook has to like walk down these white stairs. In her left hand, she's holding a crucifix dagger. That I agree with. It actually is pretty striking in isolation. But where did this staircase come from? Who knows? The final moments of the show, Margaret is holding Carrie, she's paused at her, she's seen to her again. She used the knife to stab Carrie. Carrie's like, she backs up and Carrie very gently just sort of touches her mother's face and Margaret just collapses. In the book, Carrie does basically sort of collapse Margaret's heart. In the film, the 1976, this is this incredible sequence where she's throwing knives at her and the best scene

in that movie. Margaret ends up dying looking like the statue of sense of Ashton that's in Carrie's closet. It's like a really strong visual connection. Back to Carrie, the musical, after Carrie kills her mother, she crawls down the rest of the white steps. Sue has been there, Sue has sort of been like watching the destruction and this murder. Why? I don't know, she's existing at a time with this space. Then Carrie ends up dying in Sue's arms. And then that's where the curtain blows. Where the fuck did Sue come from? After Matthew Stratford and Avon, Barbara Cook, who was nearly decapitated, said, look, I'm a professional, I'll stay for this run and then I'm out of here. There's very real danger of the show closing because their star has left.

The producer is pissed because he had no idea that Barbara Cook was unhappy. If they don't find a star for Broadway, everything's going to be canceled. Cohen and the creator team reaches out to Betty Buckley one more time and said, Betty, if you don't do this, they're going to close, Betty's going to be out of the job. We need Betty Buckley. Betty Buckley comes to the rescue. All on you. She agrees, starring the show. Just as in Carrie, a sensitive art. So realizing things could be improved, they decided to bring in a new person to address the orchestrations of the music, you know, which is just the instruments that are assigned to play what, and that's about it. As far as changes go, you know,

the horns are coming in a little late. It would be my criticism. Yeah. The synthesizer, let's go for a real piano there. It should be said that Larry Cohen and Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford are aware during that first run in Stratford that this is a big problem, but at this point, Hans is just like, we gotta do it. We're opening soon. They have a little bit of time to rehearse from New York, but at that point, Hans says, look, you go up into the balcony and I'll be down below rehearsing everybody and we'll compare notes at the end. Very soon, Hans is setting his assistant to meet with composer and book writer in script and they just basically stopped coming to rehearsal. Dean Pitchford keeps into his apartment. He says,

like, I was just ordering takeout food. I was so, I did not want to be seen in public. I just felt this venue was out of my hands and we were just going. We were just going. Knowing that it's a flop as the flop is flopping must be very difficult. So the show had previews. It was a mix of booze that people would literally like boo. But people would also cheer. People would also cheer, right? Actually, the performances were really good. Betty Buckley was bringing it. If Barbara could have had a crystalline, beautiful soprano voice, Betty Buckley's voice, she's a belter, right? Like she has like the range of like a Celine Dion or a pop star band, but there's, there's more like steel and smoke to Betty Buckley's voice. So when you've got Margaret and Kerry

that are like belting at each other is like, it's intense. Yeah. So the preview audiences, like the curtain would drop and people would, some people would clap, some people would boo, but when the actors came out for their curtain call, especially Buckley and Hailey, people just cheered. So it's not a problem with the acting clearly. It was just the sense of, hey, this show is a disaster, but you are clearly bringing it. And thank you for that. Like we're, we're glad we got to see you. Yeah. So the negative press from Stratford really dampened the presale of Kerry in New York. That's kind of like a big part of this West End transfer to Broadway is it generates buzz and there's a lot of presale and producers are like, okay, great. This is clearly going to

make money. Here's more money to keep going. Again, you're producing these things on debt. Kerry's reserves and again, a lot of the funds have been spent on that long development process. And so there was not a lot of wiggle room. Yeah. So the marketing team very smartly so leaned into the mixed responses and made commercials that said, there's never been a musical like it. Yeah, that's what you do. And they would say, some people love it. Some people hate it. I'm see for yourself. Dude. Yeah. Very smart. The secret is, if you want like a Taylor Basso type, ironic love is the gateway to unironic love. If you like something, if you like a really bad musical so much, you'll watch it five, six, seven

times. I think you just like the musical. Yeah. I think a lot of people like the musical then. I would have expected again, for the something that's been described as the worst flop of all time, like I thought people would be like, this is unredeemable. The camp is there. But clearly people really enjoyed it. Some of the reviews, Frank Rich of the New York Times, who's been called the butcher of Broadway said, those who have the time and money to waste on only one Anglo-American musical wreck on Broadway this year, might as well choose Kerry. But he also made a really good point. He said that where the rest of the evening is consistent in its uninhibited tastelessness, Kerry would be a camp masterpiece, a big budget excursion into

the theater and the ridiculous. Even so, one is grateful for the other second half pockets of delirium, including a song in which he telekinetically powered Kerry, cutely serenades for ambulatory powder puff, hairbrush and prom shoes, as Kerry Stern's mom in religious fanatic dressed up and dominatrix black from wig to boots. Even the exemplary Biddy Buckley earns one of the shows bigger on wanted laughs. Baby, don't cry. She gently tells her daughter after stabbing her with a dagger. Chris Vicks. Howard Cassell says, Kerry makes no more sense than two and a half hours of MTV, which of course it looks like. There's enough gratuitous vulgarity and Kerry that I wouldn't send a child. Clive Barnes and New York Post, he liked it. He thought it was a strong, effective

and remarkably coherent piece of terrific total theater, a schematic morality play, replete with the forces of good and evil to say nothing of a cathartic finale of biblical confusions. And guess who else liked it? Stephen King. Good, that's at the end of the day. Stephen King told the New York Times, I liked it a lot. In fact, I liked it for most of the reasons that Frank Rich did not. He and I saw the same show. We just drew different conclusions from different perspectives. That said, mixed response. That Saturday after the reviews came out, people were pretty shell shocked. The producer, Peter Kurtz, said, we're going to run the show. Critics be damned. He had a plan to come back with a new radio ad. You know, some people love us,

some people hate us, come see the real show. People cheer and they're like, okay, we're gonna press on. We're gonna, we're just gonna commit to this. We're gonna be a cult classic. We're gonna be a cult classic, right? After the speech, Kurtz left the theater, hopped in a taxi, went to JFK airport, and left the country after emptying out the accounts. And the cast showed up the next day, but there would be their final performance this Sunday, matinee, and they saw the closing notices and it would close. And there's this really sweet scene of, in that final curtain call, Lindsay Hinkley, I guess she's 17 years old, right? She's just like, because I'm in this, why don't they like it? And at the stage, like Betty Buckley turns to her and says,

this isn't our fault. You're going to have a great career. Don't think this is your fault. That's what, like, like the gym teacher from Carrie. Absolutely. One of the reasons why I'm okay sharing this story is because nobody was irreparably harmed by this. Yeah. Yeah. Hands continued at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In fact, it became the sole artistic director when Trevor Nunn would go on to the National Theater. Interesting. Betty Buckley continued to have a great career. Lindsay Hinkley, you know, would actually continue to be an actor. She has been doing Mamma Mia a lot. It's Greece. She's going back, going back to Greece. Oh, fun. She did it. She got it. Right in the story of Barbara Cook, like giving a opening night gift of a shovel to

Terry Hanson saying, this shovel's for you because you've completely buried this show. Imagine getting collateral for that kind of thing. She had to bring that in the cab. She's like, she had a plan. Oh, yeah. And she enjoyed everybody. Do you want to know what this shovel's for? So, Terry would close the 16 reviews, only three performances. It lost all eight million dollars of its investment. Interestingly, eight million dollars was also the budget for The Fan of the Opera, which opened a few months later and is continuing to run. It's now the longest running musical in Broadway history. And I think a big reason why Terry was really thought of as being the flop of flops is because in 1981, Ken Mandelbaum wrote this book called Not Since Kerry,

40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops. Oh, no. Right in the cover is Lindsay Haley in her blood covered, although she never looked that covered. That's just because that was the show of rehearsal. That's actually a pretty good effect there, being generous there. And a lot of it's just people have different ideas. Yeah. Hans was making Antigone, right. Debbie Allen was choreographing fame. I think, you know, Pitchford was writing Lyrics for Bye-Bye. Barbara Cook was trying not to get decapitated. So there was a lot going on. Yeah, no, I, for me, my post-mortem on that is I go bad direction. Sorry, bad direction on that. That's ultimately it. The director's responsibility is to take all of these elements of making theater and create a coherent vision, right? And

he took too much of a lead on certain areas and he deferred on some other things as opposed to sort of saying like, okay, what's, first of all, I think you can go a long way, but just realize what are the author's vision? Like, what's the writer's vision? Let's picture it, right? What do we see? Yeah. But again, in the 80s, it was the time of opera directors, right? Directors having visions. It was less about collaborations, like getting other people to fulfill your vision. That vision is off. I will say it's a bit of an epilogue. Carrie does rise again. In 2008, a director named Stafford Arima in New York meets with the original creators to say, okay, an idea of how to maybe fix Carrie. Let me take a crack on it. What's the worst that could happen? So it actually opened

off Broadway in 2012. First of all, they're not wearing togas. Okay, so that's problem looks like a high school. The opening number rather than being girls in the gym, it's actually all the high school students sort of singing about all these high school problems. The infamous pig blood scene is just cut. And so the second half opens at the prom, they're just setting up prom, right? They're just like, oh, the infamous, the collecting of the pig blood, the collecting of the pig blood. Okay. Yeah, yeah, no, she still gets the blood. That felt important. Yeah, the gathering of the blood was cut. And once it's cut, you're just like, yeah, that was completely. What do you do with that eight minutes? Oh, and also, like much of the book, those important dialogue scenes were

historic, right? So we actually see early on, Carrie talking to Tommy about Tommy's poetry and Sue talking to Carrie too. And so that's the version that I saw in 2013. And I saw a version of that script in Seattle, 2013. And that was my first introduction to Carrie. And I saw this is like, I actually really, I liked it. I love the Carrie and yeah, I was just wondering what happened. Now Carrie is actually produced quite frequently by a lot of universities and colleges do it. Again, it has a has a big appeal. You can find Carrie, a version of the 1988 Stratford and Avon video on YouTube. Nice. You can see interesting sort of like archival footage cut of the Broadway run. It's really, it's really cool. I recommend it just knowing the history now.

But most of all, just really kind of appreciate the performances. And they're actually really just some good writing that's in there. If you can get past the bad choices in staging and design, then you're just like, yeah, there's something here. So that's Carrie the musical. Thank you. Thank you for sharing of your like extensive knowledge of theater generally, but flop musical theater specifically. I feel very adipied. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I also like successful theater too. In fact, I prefer successful. You take that shit to some other podcast. We don't want to. Okay, we want the infamous stuff. Thank you. Well, thanks everybody. Thank you for thank you for coming and thank you for being. Do you want to do like a stay sweet to end the show?

Oh, yes, please. And remember, stay sweet. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release new episode every other Sunday. And you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. The sources that Ramon used for this episode were, of course, Carrie the musical, book by Lawrence Cohen, music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pictford, and based on the novel by Stephen King. It premiered in 1988. So besides the musical itself,

Ramon looked at a YouTube documentary series called Wait in the Wings. Their episode, the Broadway show that closed in three days, the history of Carrie the musical, published October 29, 2020. An article from the website, Carrie, a fan site, called Carrie's Facts of Life, published January 30, 2008. The film, Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, with performances by Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Betty Buckley, and more. The other film, directed by Kimberly Pierce, also called Carrie, with performances by Chloe Grace Mortz and Julianne Moore, written by Lawrence Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. The article, Carrie Gets the Royal Treatment, written by Stephen Holdren, published in the New York Times, May 8, 1988.

The novel itself, Carrie, written by Stephen King, first published by Anchor Books in 1974. The book, Not Since Carrie, 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press, 1991. An article from the New York Times, The Telekinetic Carrie, with music by Frank Rich, published May 13, 1988. Another New York Times article, this one by Mervyn Rothstein, after seven years and $70 million, Carrie is a Kinetic Memory, published May 17, 1988. And lastly, an article from The New Yorker, by Michael Schulman, is Carrie the Worst Musical of All Time, published January 27, 2012. And the song that you are listening to right now is T-Street by Brian Steele.

Color of flame, I'm Carrie. I am a summer vent this wonder, that no one will claim but someday. All my sunday, someone will know my name.