I’ve been spending my holiday watching Fox’s excellent TV show Glee on DVD (buy it here from CHUD!) and it’s put me in a real musical mood. It’s led me to dig out some great musical movies on DVD (you’ll be seeing them pop up soon enough in my new blog, The Year of Living OCD), and it’s also led me to look into some truly odd geek-oriented musicals that never quite made it to the big time.

There are a ton of geek-oriented musical projects, from songs about superheroes to entire fan-made musicals, and some have been successful. The Evil Dead musical may end up adapted into a movie, for instance. And there’s a major Spider-Man Broadway show coming this year, with music by Bono and the Edge (and I bet this will be one of the worst things ever). But there are plenty more that never saw the light of day… or that shouldn’t have. These five projects are the really strange ones, ones that failed or fizzled. And they’re all officially sanctioned on some level – fan-made stuff won’t be represented here. These are just five that appealed to me – I’m sure there’s a lot more geek-oriented musical weirdness out there.

By the way, my apologies for the multiple page nature of the article. Our current coding system gives some hassle on some browsers when embedding multiple videos, so I thought breaking things up over multiple pages made more sense. This isn’t a hit whoring ploy.

#5 – Carrie The Musical

A Broadway production about a telekinetic girl who killed everyone at her prom? Yup. Lawrence D. Cohen (not to be confused with Larry Cohen), the screenwriter of Brian DePalma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, thought that the story would make a heckuva musical; not many people agreed with him and the show closed quickly, becoming one of the biggest flops in the history of the Great White Way.

The show was probably doomed from the start – numbers were being rewritten through the opening, there were multiple technical problems, and it was (for the time) the most expensive Broadway show ever mounted. The show was getting booed at previews, and it closed three days after it opened (despite the theater being sold out in advance), thanks to harsh reviews and terrible word of mouth. 

I haven’t listened to the entire show, but the songs I’ve heard range from okay to pretty good; Carrie the Musical has found a cult audience in recent years, and there have been rumblings of an off-Broadway revival in the last couple of months. It seems like this could have worked – the talent was there, and some of the numbers seem up to snuff – but I guess a musical about a murderous teen esper needed to be a little bit cheaper to make it.

Here’s And Eve Was Weak, with Betty Buckley as Margaret White and Linzi Hately as Carrie. This song is from the first act, and it’s when Carrie tells her mother about the ‘plug it up’ incident in the school shower.