I recently reviewed Carrie: The Musical here, which…wasn’t great. It was shocking to me that a musical was made out of Carrie, but I became even more shocked to learn that there was a SECOND musical made as well. This one, Scarrie! The Musical, was an unauthorized production, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have never even heard of it. This one was unique from the first musical in that it featured guys cross-dressing as the main girl roles, so we have our leads of Carrie and Margaret essentially being men in drag.

Sadly, this musical isn’t really available anywhere to watch. I couldn’t even find any bootleg recordings that other musicals have on YouTube. All I could find was the first 10-15 minutes on YouTube, but other than that the only way I got to experience Scarrie! The Musical was by listening to its soundtrack, which is definitely more readily available than the show itself. So, I can’t comment as much as I would like on this since I didn’t get to see it in its entirety, but I did at least get a decent taste of what this is. From what I can tell, the story is based much more on the 1976 movie than it is the original book, and so the story remains pretty unchanged from that.

I just have very conflicting feelings about this one though. It’s hard not to compare it to Carrie: The Musical, but they’re kind of different beasts at the end of the day. Carrie: The Musical did an honest-to-God attempt at trying to translate Carrie into a musical, and played it as straight as it could. This is why it was a shame that it wasn’t that good, because it seemed like it was trying to be. Scarrie! The Musical seems like it’s taking the opposite approach though. It feels like it’s intentionally trying to be bad in that B-movie kind of way. I thought the results were kind of mixed, but ultimately didn’t end up working.

That’s always the risk when you try to go for a B-movie vibe though. There’s fun schlock and cringey schlock, and Scarrie! The Musical ends up falling into the latter category. I will give it the compliment of saying that its musical numbers are more memorable than that of Carrie: The Musical, but most of the time it’s memorable in how awful it sounds. There are a few times where Scarrie! The Musical transcends into so-bad-it’s-good territory, but most of the time it stays stuck in the bad territory. Like I said earlier, I don’t know of anywhere that you can actually watch the full show of this currently, but even if it gets uploaded at some point, I recommend just staying away from this one. It just doesn’t work.

1.5/5