‘Carrie’ bringing music, mayhem to Theatre Cedar Rapids stage

Cedar Rapids — Stephen King set the bar high with his 1974 debut novel, “Carrie.” Two years later, the film’s title character became Sissy Spacek’s breakout role, as a shy, sheltered, abused teen who is humiliated at her high school prom.

What her bullies don’t know is that their traumas at school and her others at home are triggering Carrie’s powers of telekinesis, allowing her to move objects — and lock doors — with her mind.

But it took a while to get the stage musical just right. Produced in fits and starts to cheers and jeers between 1988 and 2012, and plagued by production mishaps, like microphones that would malfunction when doused with stage blood, the musical finally found its footing.

If you go

What: “Carrie: The Musical”

Where: Theatre Cedar Rapids, 102 Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids

When: Sept. 20 to Oct. 13, 2024; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $27 to $59 adults; $27 students and youths; TCR Box Office, (319) 366-8591, or theatrecr.org/event/carrie-the-musical/2024-09-20/

Content warning: Contains strong language, violence, death, religious abuse, bullying, visible blood, and mentions of sexual assault

“The composer and the lyricists believed in it, and spent the next 20 years rewriting it and listening to every voice they could,” said director Christopher Okiishi, 56, of Iowa City. “And then it came back in the 2000s in an off-Broadway production that was significantly better received.”

With a few more alterations, including cellphones, that’s the version coming to the Theatre Cedar Rapids stage from Sept. 20 to Oct. 13.

Even with moving it to contemporary times, it still “feels like a piece that is sort of out of time a bit, out of space, and is really a cautionary that, if anything, is more resonant than it ever has been,” Okiishi said.

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It’s also just a smidgen kinder than the movie toward Carrie’s fanatically religious mother, Margaret, played with wild abandon by Piper Laurie in the 1976 film.

Don’t worry: It’s still a blood-drenched look at teenage trials, filled with bullying, murder and mayhem. So don’t bring your little ones, if you’d like them to ever sleep again.

“It really does honor the Stephen King source material and restore some dignity to Margaret, and that mother-daughter conflict that he wrote so eloquently about,” said Okiishi, a psychiatrist, who brings his expertise to the production and rehearsal process. “It also speaks to Stephen King’s desire to give power to a victim. And that’s very much the story. I also think it’s perfectly spooky for Halloween.

“But the other thing, and it’s slightly trite, but we’re approaching this like James Cameron approached ‘Titanic,’ which is by the time the ice falls on the ship, you’ve forgotten the ship was going to crash. So by the time we end up at prom, we hope the audience has been having such a good time with these amazing characters and this ‘Grease’-like play about high school that you forget a tragedy is about to happen.”

So what’s the music like?

“Oh, it is super fun,” said Janelle Lauer, 54, of Cedar Rapids, TCR’s music director. “There’s parts of it that are just joyous and great and rock ’n’ roll. And then there’s other songs that are so twisted and evil, and just emotional. I just love it.”

“If you don’t walk out saying, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, this is going to be a night you never forget,’ that line and that melody repeats three times throughout the show and means something different each time,” Okiishi said. “And ‘The World According to Chris’ is a tour de force number. It’s really, really, really wonderful. And then I think people are going to go out and download the cast album for the Margaret and Carrie songs.”

Margaret

Kristen Behrendt DeGrazia, 56, of Iowa City, is sliding into Margaret White’s skin.

“She is a mom off the rails … with just a total rigid, conservative belief system that dictates every aspect of her life, and therefore Carrie’s life,” DeGrazia said. “She does have this love for Carrie, and that is something that I feel like you see more in the musical than you would in maybe the original movie. She’s a little more complex that way, at least what we get to see of her.”

Even without much back story in the musical, audiences will sense that Margaret has had her share of tough experiences.

“In her mind, she truly believes Carrie was born of sin, and it’s really her job to protect Carrie in every way she possibly can and almost absolve her own sins, through making Carrie not repeat them,” DeGrazia said. “She protects her from the sins of the world, and very much men in particular. So it’s kind of fascinating that way.

“There’s really a push and pull in the script,” she added. “There are moments that the audience gets to see when Margaret’s alone, where she shows feeling guilt for the horrible things she does to Carrie. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say she’s an empathetic character or not, but you can see that, which I think maybe helps the musical work.”

Margaret’s music is different from the rest of the show, DeGrazia noted, and shows another side of her than you get from the original movie.

“Carrie and Margaret’s world is completely insulated and otherly from everything else,” DeGrazia said, “and that’s how the musical is structured. Every single one of my scenes is in the same room in my house, with Carrie. I have no involvement with anybody else … so that’s really interesting. And then the music is styled very differently than all the music that the teenagers sing at the school.”

“There’s some powerhouse stuff in there,” Lauer said, describing Margaret’s music. “There’s a vulnerability that she has that, like Kristen was saying, you’re not going to get in the movie. But in some of the songs that she sings, you can tell that she’s vulnerable. And then she’s got these soaring high notes, too, that are very angelic to go with her religious zealot kind of a feel.”

Her music almost has an operatic feel at times, DeGrazia said.

“I think the major difference is the songs between Carrie and Margaret are serious, and they’re serious musically, as well,” Okiishi noted. “They develop a theme, there’s repeated motifs. It is a complex melodic and harmonic structure. And then the songs for most of the other characters are pop songs and feel like pop songs, and are well-constructed pop songs, but don’t have that same musical complexity.”

“For both Carrie and Margaret, they have to be able to go from a lighter tonality, a caring tonality, to fierce in one fell swoop,” Lauer added. “They’re both very challenging parts vocally.”

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Carrie

For the title role of Carrie White, Katelyn Halverson, 22, of North Liberty, is channeling what she observed in high school.

“I've dealt with my own share of traumas and anxieties that I can kind of tap into, and, of course, like not being super far removed from high school, I understand what it’s like to be bullied, to see bullying happen,” she said.

“I was not the Carrie of my school, but I know several people who were seen like that were not treated very kindly. So when I think of this role, I think back to those people and I feel a lot of empathy for them. I try to get into a place and think what would that have been like if I was being treated like that, like thinking about how wrong it is to be treated like that. Because when you’re in school, and you see that stuff happening, you don’t really realize how wrong and how awful it is.

“But when you step back a few years later, you can really take it in. That stuff is not OK, that stuff is cruel, that stuff just can ruin a person. And that’s what’s happening in Carrie’s case. So I really do draw from a lot of life experience to kind of capture her — her anger, her anxieties, her sadness, all of that stuff. … it’s been interesting to explore.”

She described Carrie as “very complex.”

“Throughout the musical, she experiences a whole range of emotions and events from her peers, from her mother,” Halverson said, noting the Carrie Whites in the book, movie and 2013 remake are very different. “I don’t think that Carrie necessarily needs to look or act a certain way. It’s about what’s going on inside of her mind, and I think that’s portrayed really well in the musical, especially through the songs.”

The music also moves the timid character in a new direction.

"When she breaks out into song, it’s just like a stark contrast — we can really see what’s going on in Carrie’s mind, and we can really understand who she is, why she does what she does, and we can kind of have empathy for her.

“It’s such a fun part,” Halverson said. “It’s kind of strange to say that about a part like Carrie, just because she does kill everybody, and she’s going through all of this very traumatic stuff, but there’s just so much to this role, and it’s been such an experience getting to work on this the past few weeks.”

TCR’s costume design director, Jessica Helberg, 27, of Cedar Rapids, gets to supervise and clean up the mess that will be Carrie’s prom dress during dress rehearsals and performances.

No magical stage trickery for this pivotal moment in the show.

“It will be a full blood drop,” Helberg said. “It’s such an iconic moment that people correlate to the show, that we had to make sure we got it right, so it will be blood.”

Stage blood, that is, not real animal blood. The stage version is thick and sticky.

“To make it look like it’s real blood, there is a certain element that just has to be gross and messy,” Helberg said. “But obviously, we need to consider the safety of the actor and also the safety of the garment (and) the cleaning process. It’s still very sticky, but because it’s being poured out on an actor’s head, it’s eye-safe and it’s edible, and so far so good. We’re still toying around with the recipe.”

Stage blood can be hard to wash out, so duplicate dresses are being made.

“We found over the years that it alleviates some of that wear and tear of having to be washed and then soaked and pressed every single night, so they’ll just be on a rotation with a third one in back stock for emergencies,” Helberg said.

Okiishi added that sound designer Darin Ulmer has come up with a sleight-of-hand way to protect the actor’s microphone, so it won’t be doused with blood and die.

They’ll leave that to the characters.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com