Bucket list: Maligned musical Carrie to get first cast recording

Poor Carrie can’t catch a break. Adapted from Stephen King’s teen-horror novel, the show’s 1988 Broadway debut was a flashy fiasco. Bootleg recordings of the score were passed around for years by musical-theater cultists, who chortled over its combination of intense and compelling mother-daughter drama and risible high-school high jinks. But Carrie's authors refused to abandon their show to camp legend, and spent the next two decades rewriting it. A much-improved version opened Off Broadway on March 1, but it kicked the bloody bucket last weekend, two weeks ahead of schedule. (If the original was not good enough to last, this Carrie may not have been bad enough; people who came to see one of Broadway’s most infamous flops were surprised to find a tale that, at its best, was as strangely moving as its telekinetic antiheroine.)

But musical-theater fans who couldn’t see Carrie will soon get a chance to take a position on it anyhow. (Love? Hate? Love-hate?) A Times postmortem for the show noted that a “cast album recording—a theatrical measure of success—has not been announced, though one is said to be in the works.” Say no more: Time Out New York has learned that the musical will indeed be recorded for posterity by Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight Records, which has emerged in recent years as the preeminent show-music label of our time; its catalog includes The Book of Mormon, Next to Normal and In the Heights. The revival’s cast, led by Molly Ranson and Marin Mazzie, will hit the studio on April 17. (For more information on the album, see here.)

“Preserving Carrie with her first real cast album insures that she will never die,” says Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight honcho Kurt Deutsch. “I look forward to releasing it on Ghostlight and hope that this album sparks the imagination of the next generation of musical-theater artists, and builds excitement for future productions to be licensed both nationally and internationally.” Who knows? In high schools, colleges and regional theaters around the world, Carrie might just get the last laugh yet.