Getting All Fired Up over Nothing CARRIE

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Terry Hands took over from Trevor Nunn as sole artistic director of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, he had a daunting artistic legacy to equal. But, according to associates, Hands may have yearned just as much to emulate Nunn's commercial success -- and income -- as director of the musicals Cats, Les Miserables and Starlight Express. Hands committed himself to staging a most unorthodox venture for the R.S.C.: a $7 million musical adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 horror novel Carrie. In meetings, colleagues say, Hands was apt to recite costs and potential box-office income at various Broadway houses.

Carrie had made a successful 1976 film, and the musical adapters had helped create the film and TV series Fame. Nevertheless, from the moment the project went into rehearsal with a mixed British and American cast, it seemed as ill- fated as its characters: an awkward teenage girl, her religiously obsessed mother and a high school full of taunting girls and boys who come to grief when the target of their mockery demonstrates supernatural powers of destruction in a crowded gym on prom night. Carrie was blasted by London critics when it opened a four-week run in February at the R.S.C.'s home in Stratford-upon-Avon. The show was rewritten almost nightly; special effects misfired disastrously; one of the two leads quit. Problems continued when it moved to New York City, and the opening was postponed beyond the cutoff for Tony nominations, undercutting the marketing strategy.

What finally opened last week was two musicals lumped together, one compellingly written and overpoweringly performed, the other so ditzily conceived and garishly staged that it deflates the first. The scenes between Carrie (Linzi Hateley, 17) and her mother (Betty Buckley, a 1983 Tony winner for Cats) crackle with longing. The daughter is love starved and so innocent that she does not know what is happening when she menstruates in the high school shower. Her mother is aquiver with barely suppressed sexuality, yet ablaze with guilty memory. The conflict between the girl's aching to be normal and her mother's fear that she will go astray aspires to metaphysical tragedy. The last image, on a temple-like staircase, is of Mother, Daughter and what seems to be a Holy Friend, and the final gesture is a mutual mother-daughter sacrifice.

Offsetting this intensity are ludicrously campy high school scenes featuring girls who look and dress like 28-year-old hookers. They taunt Carrie in a highly unfeminine fashion that might be more plausible if they were jocks abusing a classmate perceived as a sissy. Rock Star Darlene Love, playing a teacher, breaks character to step forward and smile in acknowledgment of the audience's greeting. The high school bits are apparently meant to be spoofs, except for a bizarre dance about slaughtering a pig, which turns out, inadvertently, to be the funniest moment. As gross-out entertainment, Carrie fails to deliver. Early scenes offer literal stage blood and fire, but the gymnasium Gotterdammerung is all metaphor. It is just smoke and flashing lights and lasers asking to be transformed by the audience's imagination -- a quality lacking in the creators of this mismatched morass.