Notes on ‘Carrie: The Musical’ in La Mirada

The following is not at review. It’s notes, people. I say that because I saw a preview of the show over the weekend and things are always bound to change before opening night, which is tonight.

It is also not a review because I’m not writing this for the general theatre-going public. If I was writing this with my theatre-critic hat on this piece might be different. A lot of money and hard work went into this production, and a fair amoint of it pays off. The stage illusions, in particular, are great.

Then there’s a whole meta-layer about the idea of doing a soft R-rated musical version of a story that is hypercritical of religious fanaticism in a county that is known for its fundamentalist evangelical population.

But this piece is not about all that.

I’m writing this for the enthusiasts of immersive theatre and events who read No Proscenium, and we’re a particular bunch. I viewed Carrie through that lens and I took that lens up because of these words featured prominently in their marketing materials:

CARRIE comes to LA in a blazing new environmental- immersive production, which puts the audience, for the first time ever, at the center of this classic story.

There was also this warning further down the line:

Audiences might stand and move with the actors at certain times. Comfortable shoes and clothing are recommended. Wheelchair guests will be accommodated.

But words, as a certain writer notes, are wind. I’m here to tell you that this production of Carrie: The Musical is barely immersive, and what little immersive magic there is winds up being distributed very unevenly.

Things started out well enough in the pre-show. The audience was separated into “classes” before entering the theatre. This engendered a lot of the old feelings as those of us in the “sophomore class” watched the Seniors and Juniors enter “Prom” before we did. The load-in took a long time, which felt like a merciless tease: just what was going on inside that theatre?

When we finally got called to go inside the answer was more mundane than magical.

To be fair, the set design is intense: the stage deck has been turned into a gym, complete with sets of bleachers on stage left and right. To get to the cheap seats — where we sophomores belonged — meant crossing the stage deck, heading up onto a kind of gantry set, and then passing through the backstage to get to the back of the bleachers. That was actually a lot of fun, and brought back old memories.

There was little in the way of immersive touches for the cheap seats after that. Four seats of bleachers in the front are set on wagons which the cast and crew move around during different numbers. It must have been really neat to be in those seats sometimes. For the rest of us it was just kind of annoying to occasionally have our view of the action obscured because an entire set of seats were moved in to block us.

Overall it felt like for every good choice that was made in trying to do something different with this production there were three choices that undercut that idea. The cast was game, and as the night went on I gained an appreciation for how strange the quasi-in-the-round setup must have been to a bunch of professional musical theatre actors. At times it seemed like the choreographer had no idea what to do with the odd staging. The opening number was put together so that it would have been really cool if we were all sitting out in the house.

Trying to shoehorn in hot buzzwords is rarely a good idea if you don’t really understand them. That’s what seems to be going on here. Sure, a couple of the members of the audience got to dance at the Prom… for all of about 25 seconds. I’d feel bad about spoiling that, but you’re not missing much.

I know that people like to debate what “immersive” means, that the colloquial definition gives a lot of leeway into how it’s used as a marketing term. With that in mind, I want to plead with producers: if the heart of what you’re doing doesn’t involve the audience being enveloped by the action of the play don’t use the term.

Honestly I don’t know how I’d categorize Carrie: The Musical. It’s a show that tries a non-traditional staging with an emphasis on spectacle that sprinkles in some limited, low-stakes audience participation to cover a marketing claim. I do know, however, that it doesn’t belong in the No Proscenium canon, and for that reason I will be pulling it from the LA Edition of the newsletter. Something I take no pleasure in doing.

The newsletter exists because I want people to connect with the immersive work that they’re hungry for, and I’m the hungriest one of us all.