Carrie: The Musical

Any story set in high school is a horror story, practically by definition, unless it's a musical... unless, of course, the production in question is "Carrie: The Musical," the newly-resurgent, re-tooled version of the famous flop from the 1980s.

Unfortunately, the production put up by SpeakEasy Stage Company, and running through June 7, while not an out and out failure from any technical standpoint, does suffer the evil of banality. In large part, this is due to the show's '80s provenance: The mean girls are mean in generic, "Heathers"-esque way; composer Michael Gore's music has a stale sound about it (despite being performed by a live orchestra); and, even though cell phone cameras are deployed and cruel posts on social media are thrown up with hasty, malicious glee, the overall tone and feel is tinged with a certain vintage quality that smacks of the yellowed pages of the show's four-decade-old source material, Stephen King's novel "Carrie."

There may be, as a critic famously noted, a twisted anti-"Cinderella" tale buried in King's iconic telling, maybe even a poignant one, but the show's book (by Lawrence D. Cohen) and lyrics (by Dean Pitchford) -- lead-lined with the usual platitudes about being nice to outcasts and seeking the shy inner beauty of those who stand out as being different or strange -- make its contours hard to suss out. SpeakEasy's interpretation plays to the campy side of the material, but one senses that the play wants to be something more -- something truly scary, only it doesn't have the lean, wolfen muscle, nor the heart for it. If it did, that heart would, at the proper moment, be ripped still beating from the text and devoured with demonic relish.

Relish, alas, gives way to rehash. The usual character types are all in attendance, going through their expected paces. The play's shallow characters are silly and shrill, though the cast gamely try to give their characters dimension. Mean girl Chris (Paige Berkovitz) has the gleaming eyes of a natural predator; she's learned the lessons of the jungle from her lawyer father not in spite of, but because of her own feral nature. Nice girl Sue (Sarah Drake), meantime, cultivates a conscience, and the audience can see her struggle to break out of a shell of conformity that views demeaning others as an acceptable pastime. Sue's boyfriend, Tommy Ross (Joe Longthorne), the school's top athlete and easily one of the more popular kids, possesses a natural kindness and reflective nature; he finds depths in himself that surpass his role as a jock, and contemplates a career as a writer.

Adults are largely absent from this teen-centric world (for that matter, most teens are also absent, which makes the eventual prom night seem like an anaemic affair), but aside from Margaret only the slightly lesbionic gym teacher, sympathetic Miss Gardner (Shonna Cirone) has much of a role. Carrie (Elizabeth Erardi) herself -- meek, withdrawn, and damaged by her mother, Margarate (Kerry A. Dowling), who is religious to the point of delusion -- shows glimmers of wisdom and intelligence that we only wish had been expounded upon.

Instead, we get the full-on "High School is Hell" treatment from the book, abetted by After-School Special lyrics. At least the set design, by Eric Levenson, manages the not-inconsiderable trick of resembling a typical high school while simultaneously evoking the castle of so many creature-feature monster movies. Jeff Adelberg's lighting, in which blocks of color clash into one another and subdivide the performance space, pays homage to the horror classics of cinema, and washes the set with blood-red hues in sinister foreshadowing of the carnage to come.

The special effects are largely convincing, which helps. Carrie, punished by being manacled to a prayer bench, watches as a crucifix levitates; later, her attempt to harness her own telekinetic power causes the page of a book to turn, desks to slide, and -- at an opportune cue during one song, and to comic effect -- a table to glide within reach. Se�ghan McKay's well-executed projection design offers some trite imagery (Carrie's happy; the sky is blue. Trouble brews; the skies cloud over), but there's an inventive visual motif whenever Carrie's special abilities come into play -- a ripple across the projected images that expands like a wave of mental energy. But when the time for the big payoff rolls around and Carrie is pushed too far, there just isn't a stagecraft equivalent of a good movie-style gore-fest; this is fine, if the slaughter is intimated in an appropriately intimidating, chilling manner, but not much happens in this telling. It's as though director Paul Melone had simply drawn a blank when trying to decide how to communicate the spectacle and terror of Carrie's wrath unleashed. McKay's projections attempt to take up the slack with some energetic graphics that suggest general collapse, as well as flames, and David Reiffel, whose sound design is effective throughout, assembles layers of appropriate sonic chaos, but as well done as these technical feats are, they are still dressing shaped around a missing component of fear and horror.

What works better is the sight of post-outburst Carrie passing serenely, and safely, through a doorway and into light beyond -- as though she were leaving the mortal coil and all its atrocities behind for a more suitable afterlife. (This moment of placid security is short-lived, of course, and a few minutes later Dowling --�with the simple gesture of raising a knife --�captures the horror that the rest of the show is missing.)

The music is less than inspired, but it does offer a couple of moments of real possibility: Carrie's first scene with her mother is set to the rousing, sincere "Open Your Heart," which sounds as though it would be right at home in any evangelical church service. (It's only a little bit later, with talk of women's "blood curse" and the song "And Eve Was Weak," that we really get clued in about Margaret's lunacy, which derives at least in part from the same episode of rape that resulted in Carrie's birth.)

The show's literary aspects come straight from the Stephen King novel upon which it's based: Blood, youth, alienation, bullying, power politics, teen sexuality, cynical calculus. The show is wise to hold on to those things, but the script and music don't add anything of substance, though they might provide some stylistic elements. "Carrie: The Musical" is a reflection of its own genre insofar as it is a living trope: That of the misshapen hybrid. If you're feeling like a mean girl, you might want to go laugh at it (and to be fair, the show does offer some moments of genuine humor). But there's just not enough meat on the play's bones to spark a lot of pity for its poor, and ultimately tragic, heroine.

"Carrie: The Musical" continues through June 7 at the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street. For tickets and more information, please visit www.speakeasystage.com/index.php