Horror isn’t exactly a genre known for making someone break out in song. That is, unless you’re Jordan Lage. The SMU sophomore is the star of “Carrie: The Musical” at Dallas-based Theatre Three. The show, which runs through November 4, is a production of the 2012 adaptation of the classic Stephen King story following the emergence of a bullied teenage girl’s psychic powers and a prom night gone very wrong.
“I think musicals can be a lot more useful as a tool in different genres than people realize,” Lage, who’s majoring in music education and voice performance, says. “Music is the most powerful medium we have, in my musician’s opinion, but I think that it shows a lot more emotion than we think it does.”
With music by Michael Gore, perhaps best known for his work on “Fame” and “Terms of Endearment,” “Carrie: The Musical” provides an 80’s rock-infused riff on the bloody horror in King’s work. It’s a melding of genres that appealed to both Theatre Three and the SMU Meadows School of the Arts, leading to the show becoming their first official co-production.
“We have had an informal relationship with (SMU) for a few seasons now where we hire their grad students,” Theatre Three Associate Artistic Director and “Carrie” Director Christie Vela says. The theater company already has deep ties to the university. Besides casting its grad students, Theatre Three Director in Residence Joel Ferrell became the university’s inaugural director of the newly created Sexton Institute for Musical Theatre last year. Meadows School of the Arts Head of Acting Blake Hackler frequently directs at Theatre Three. “What we’re hoping is that this will be the beginning of a bigger collaboration,” Vela says.
Lage joined “Carrie” after the show’s musical director, Vonda K. Bowling, encouraged her to audition. Lage recalls Bowling was working with SMU on a cabaret-style program called “Curtain Up!” at the time and wanted some of the voice performance majors in it to try out for the production, including Lage. “It’s been amazing,” Bowling says in an email of working with the SMU undergraduates. “They are so excited to sing and learn, and I have a feeling they will look back at this show as one of their favorite performances.“
Balancing school with her “Carrie” commitments hasn’t been easy for Lage, but she’s found respite in the rehearsal process. “Music is a pretty grueling degree, but for me, rehearsals have been what I look forward to at the end of the day,” Lage, who has past experience in theater and opera, says. “It’s kind of nice to be able to do something that I’m not getting graded on and just act a little more organically.”
It certainly doesn’t hurt that Lage, a self-described “huge horror fan,” gets to work with fellow enthusiasts Vela and Bowling to recreate this iconic story. Vela “really loves horror movies” and hosts her own horror podcast. Bowling “obsessively listened” to the “Carrie: The Musical” soundtrack for months after hearing it for the first time on Halloween night in 2013.
In other words, both have a passion for the material and a desire to see it translated to the stage in a properly scare-inducing manner. The two directors finally embarked on “Carrie” together after Vela suggested it during work on Theatre Three’s production of “Next to Normal” last year. “I’m just always interested in pushing those boundaries and seeing what we can do with the genre on stage,” Vela says, noting that good horror is hard to pull off in theater.
The production makes use of practical effects to showcase Carrie’s telekinetic powers and other iconic horror moments in the show. Vela praises Theatre Three’s “very innovative” designers for helping create those moments and “finding ways of creating practical effects that are both fun and kind of magical to watch.”
Lage credits the “unknown fear” built throughout King’s book itself for helping inspire her performance. “That’s what I love about ‘Carrie.’ You can see what’s going on inside her head and what’s building and building and building until it finally explodes,” Lage says. “That is really what I loved about it and what I really tried to emphasize in playing her.”
She hopes audiences are “genuinely scared” when watching “Carrie” and perhaps even forget that they’re watching live theater. “I want them to be in it. I want there to be this unnerving feeling of just looking inside their own soul,” Lage says.
Beyond scaring audiences, however, Lage and Vela feel the deeper themes behind “Carrie” are the true takeaways that make it an enduring and impactful story. “The low-hanging fruit is bullying is bad, but I don’t even think that was Stephen King’s main theme there,” Lage says.
Instead, it’s the tale of a young woman finding her power as she’s coming of age that the starring actor and her director feel is the show’s greatest theme. “(Carrie is) this young woman who is growing up and realizing how difficult it is to be a woman in this world, and finally kind of breaking out of that and not caring what anyone thinks about her,” Vela says. “Sadly, by the time she’s able to do that, it’s too late. The generational damage has been done.”
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