This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:05] Blake Ross: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a very special crossover episode from two of your favorite Broadway Podcast Network shows.

[0:14] Blake Ross: My name is Blake. I'm the host of Burnt, which is a true crime podcast about the crazy musical that never was, Rebecca. And I'm joined by two jolly fellows across the pond.

[0:26] Chris Adams: Hello.

[0:28] Holly Morgan: Hello there.

[0:29] Chris Adams: I'm Chris.

[0:30] Holly Morgan: Nice to meet you.

[0:31] Chris Adams: And I'm Holly.

[0:33] Holly Morgan: Hello.

[0:34] Chris Adams: We're friends from Out for Blood.

[0:40] Blake Ross: And the history of convening this crossover episode is nearly as convoluted as the history about Carrie the Musical and Rebecca.

[0:48] Holly Morgan: Yes.

[0:48] Blake Ross: For anybody who has any disillusions about the podcasting world, Holly and myself are both in our closet studios.

[0:59] Chris Adams: Big time.

[0:59] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[1:00] Blake Ross: And Chris is currently playing the ghost of himself with a white sheet over his head.

[1:08] Chris Adams: And that is his home studio.

[1:10] Chris Adams: I don't know what you're talking about. This is a professional podcasting studio that I have purchased.

[1:15] Chris Adams: This is not a duvet draped over some boxes.

[1:18] Chris Adams: It's very high quality.

[1:21] Blake Ross: And this podcast has been months in the making because we tried to record it once.

[1:26] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[1:27] Blake Ross: And some cheeky little ghosts got in the way.

[1:30] Holly Morgan: They were like, you will not talk about failed musicals on my watch.

[1:34] Chris Adams: It was the ghost of musicals past.

[1:37] Blake Ross: It was this is take three, I think.

[1:40] Chris Adams: This is King Kiri on this podcast.

[1:43] Blake Ross: So if you are listening to this, dear God, it's worked. We're here.

[1:46] Blake Ross: We're here in your feed. It's the collaboration that you never knew you needed in your life.

[1:51] Holly Morgan: Exactly.

[1:52] Blake Ross: But you do. The match made in heaven.

[1:55] Chris Adams: Two Broadway disasters together.

[1:57] Holly Morgan: Yes, at last.

[1:58] Blake Ross: In your ears.

[1:59] Chris Adams: Carrie and Rebecca.

[2:00] Holly Morgan: Two very different ladies, but with actually quite a lot in common, as we discovered on our first or second time discussing the musicals together.

[2:08] Blake Ross: Exactly. They were both, oh, they both have their wonderful, wonderful points, and they both were utter disasters in the end.

[2:17] Blake Ross: So let's first for the uninitiated, although I can't imagine somebody winding up on this specific episode not knowing one or the other, or knowing both, but just in case people don't have the insider knowledge yet. Give us the quick lowdown on what Out for Blood is.

[2:39] Chris Adams: And it's source material, your favorite musical.

[2:44] Chris Adams: Go.

[2:44] Holly Morgan: In one minute or less.

[2:46] Chris Adams: Shall I start, Holly?

[2:47] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[2:48] Chris Adams: How do we begin? So Holly and I discovered, we like to think we discovered this dusty VHS tape back in our youth, which was many decades ago now, sadly.

[2:58] Chris Adams: And on this dusty VHS tape, we discovered a grainy recording of a musical we just couldn't believe that had been filmed by someone in the audience in the 80s.

[3:07] Chris Adams: So presumably quite, you know, a difficult job to film a Broadway musical from your seat in the 80s. And this musical was, of course, Carrie the Musical.

[3:15] Chris Adams: And it turned out that a lot of people had actually discovered the show before we did. We didn't, we weren't the first people to find it.

[3:21] Chris Adams: But basically, Carrie is indeed a musical based on the Stephen King novel and the famous movie.

[3:28] Chris Adams: Um, so unlikely material to start with to make a musical out of. A girl who discovers she has telekinetic powers when she has her first period in the showers at school and goes on to kill all of her classmates.

[3:42] Chris Adams: I mean, what kind of a perfect night out on Broadway?

[3:45] Holly Morgan: Yeah, feel good family.

[3:48] Holly Morgan: Holiday show.

[3:49] Chris Adams: And anyway, some people got together in the early 80s. The award-winning team behind Fame, the perfect match for such sort of material, got together with the Royal Shakespeare Company, of course, and they got together to make this show with an all-star cast and a wonderful new star called Lindsay Haley, who was only 17 at the time.

[4:12] Chris Adams: The show premiered here in the UK in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it was just universally panned by critics, but actually loved by audiences, which was amazing, we found partly because it was just this bizarre mixture of kind of high school musical Greece style dance, high-energy dance routines choreographed by Debbie Allen, and this bizarre kind of classical, almost ancient Greek-like aesthetic that had been put together by Terry Hands, the director who was also running the RSC, due to a bit of a misunderstanding after someone told him to make the show look like Greece.

[4:53] Chris Adams: And of course, everyone loves Greece, the musical set in a high school, but he, with his classical theatre training, took that to mean Greece as in ancient Greece and truly Greece. And it somehow took this musical millions of dollars down the rabbit hole from one misunderstanding for a pretty much a misunderstanding.

[5:14] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[5:15] Holly Morgan: So weird.

[5:15] Chris Adams: Yeah, and I mean, Holly, take it from there because after the Stratford debacle, they decided the Broadway debacle.

[5:24] Holly Morgan: Why not just leave it as it is and take it to Broadway?

[5:27] Chris Adams: Yeah, they basically didn't really change anything.

[5:31] Holly Morgan: Apart from a key cast member, actually.

[5:33] Chris Adams: So much like this crossover episode, it was a pan-Atlantic production.

[5:41] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[5:41] Chris Adams: Half the cast for good time, Holly.

[5:44] Holly Morgan: Thank you.

[5:45] Holly Morgan: And so, yes, half the cast for American, half the cast of British, and then when they took it to Broadway, the wonderful Barbara Cook was replaced with, well, she didn't want to do it anymore for reasons which we go into in our podcast, and Betty Buckley took over.

[6:03] Holly Morgan: And then the Broadway shenanigans kick off, which is a whole riot in itself. Very sudden closure.

[6:15] Chris Adams: And but we do go into what happened, the life after death, the hand through the grave of Carrie the Musical.

[6:22] Holly Morgan: Because I guess like Rebecca never happened, but Carrie actually made it to the stage briefly, yeah, and then went away for a couple of decades, and then there was this kind of army of fans who almost kind of campaigned to bring it back, and then in the early 2010s, the writers came back together and rewrote the show and kind of contemporized, is that even a word?

[6:43] Chris Adams: They contemporized it.

[6:44] Holly Morgan: Let's let's go with it, and they did a new version of the show, and now it's performed all over the world, which is kind of amazing. And it's been on Riverdale, and it's had all these strange kind of returns, and yeah, so Carrie came back, Carrie rose from the dead, and we kind of went back and explored the entire history of it.

[7:05] Chris Adams: Which was fun. Because Carrie became sort of a cult classic. Whereas Rebecca was the show that never was.

[7:15] Holly Morgan: And the story of it became much larger and frankly a bit more interesting than the actual musical ever could have been.

[7:23] Blake Ross: Definitely. And I think I always think that this story is a bit like the Carrie story, but with way more lawsuits and court cases.

[7:32] Chris Adams: Yes.

[7:32] Blake Ross: So again, for anybody who's an Out for Blood fan but hasn't yet found Burnt, Rebecca the musical is a bit similar in its sort of like dark, mysterious nature, and that it's, you know, thriller, if you will, and it's based on the Daphne du Maurier novel from the 30s that then became an Alfred Hitchcock movie in the 40s, and then about this young woman who doesn't have a name because, you know, at in the 40s, women didn't need to have names, whatever.

[8:09] Blake Ross: So she was a nameless young biddy who falls in love with this dashing widower named Max, and Max sweeps her up and brings whisks her back to his beautiful mansion called Manderley, because back then homes also had names. You couldn't just say it's my home, you had to say it's called Manderley.

[8:31] Blake Ross: So he brought her back to Manderley, and there they encounter the very spooky character of Mrs. Danvers, and she's this older caretaker of Manderley the Mansion, and she did also embody the physical embodiment of the ghost of Maxim's first wife, the title character of Rebecca.

[8:57] Blake Ross: Anyway, the musical went through a bunch of different successful iterations over in Europe. And what made it interesting was not so much the musical, as I said, it was the crazy court cases that came afterward.

[9:13] Blake Ross: Basically, this producer, the podcast is less about the musical and more about the court cases. And this producer who became a man obsessed. His name is Ben Sprecker, and he became obsessed with putting this show on and having this be his big Phantom of the Opera moment. And it turned out being his complete downfall.

[9:36] Blake Ross: And there's court cases and there's jails and there's jail calls and there's fake deaths, there's sabotage from the inside. There's a lot of rigor all with this old gal Rebecca.

[9:46] Chris Adams: So Rebecca and Carrie, these gals had crazy times on the stage.

[9:53] Holly Morgan: They certainly did.

[9:55] Chris Adams: Absolutely loved the podcast, Blake. It was just a ride, and it obviously way upostre. How did you kind of like you spoke to some amazing people? Which guests did you kind of enjoy speaking to the most making this amazing show?

[10:11] Blake Ross: Well, I will say that so this part of it centers around the producer Ben Sprecker, and part of it centers around this man named Mark Hotton, who is this notorious con man from Long Island, which is where I'm from in New York. And he ended up perpetuating this huge myth around who he was, who he knew, the people that he brought into this business, and created this big con that destroyed this musical and he ends up going to jail.

[10:30] Blake Ross: And I found Mark Hotton in jail. Um and it was my first, um, as a big true crime lover. It was my first jail call. You know, like the you have a call from a federal prison. And I was like dying when I got this phone call because I just, you know, you see it in the movies or you see it on a dateline. And there was Mark Hotton. It was so strange to be a part of to like experience the whole prison communication system.

[11:18] Blake Ross: Um, and talk to this guy who was in jail, and he's not in jail anymore. He ended up, it took a wild turn because of COVID. Like the whole world took a wild turn, and he ended up getting out of prison, going back to Long Island and kind of giving me a bit of the runaround.

[11:33] Blake Ross: But I found him at this Volkswagen dealership where he now works and presumably has gone on the straight and narrow and taken like a real job and like stopped conning people, but you never know. So it kind of just got me interested. I've always been interested in this in the case of bringing Rebecca to the stage because it just kept getting crazier and crazier and crazier.

[11:55] Blake Ross: I was you couldn't make this stuff up. It was such a bizarre road for this show. And it was all about a Broadway show. It wasn't about like, you know, the Pentagon or, you know, Facebook or some multimillion dollar multi-billion dollar conglomerate. It was like it was just a show that ended up just getting crazy.

[12:16] Chris Adams: Who was it? Who was your favorite person that you guys spoke to?

[12:19] Blake Ross: Oh my gosh, we spoke to some amazing people. Um well, there was this sort of incredible night when we assembled the original, uh well, we didn't assemble, we we make we got in touch with with uh with the wonderful Kenny from the original ensemble who put together via his, you know, Facebook and a network of uh this they're still very close, a lot of them. And we sat in Kenny's garden and sort of fangirled at the original cast, who were just completely baffled by these two weirdos with microphones and they were like, What you why do you want to talk to us about this? No, but it sounded like they got it all the time. It sounded like it thought it was because it became a cult classic, it kind of followed them wherever they go that everybody wanted to talk to them about it.

[13:03] Chris Adams: Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of them were saying, you know, whatever they auditioned for, as soon as people clocked that they had been in Carrie, that was all they were interested in hearing about. They just kind of, you know, people like, no, you weren't sure. And this just became their lives, you know. They went on to bigger and better things, if there is such a thing as a bigger and better thing than Carrie the musical, but it just kind of followed them around their entire lives and careers.

[13:27] Holly Morgan: Yeah. And the stories we heard, the more people we spoke to, Holly really, the more we kind of dug out of the archives.

[13:34] Blake Ross: I mean, oh, absolutely. That pig, that whole pig chain.

[13:39] Holly Morgan: What wait, what was the pig thing?

[13:41] Blake Ross: I mean, I know the pig's blood, but was there there's a fake pig or something?

[13:45] Holly Morgan: Yeah. Remind me.

[13:47] Blake Ross: Yeah, there is a fake pig. There was like an animatronic pig in the show for a while in Stratford, which got cut because it was too weird. And then like the orchestra. You don't say I still can't quite follow this through. The orchestrator kind of stole it as they were shipping it off somewhere. And then he just casually dropped into an interview that he had it in his house. And the next thing we know, he's sent photos of the pig. And this is this pig that we kind of joked about for 20 years. And there it was.

[14:16] Holly Morgan: Oh my god.

[14:17] Blake Ross: And he's got it.

[14:18] Holly Morgan: He's got it.

[14:19] Blake Ross: Yeah. I w I want to go and see it. We want to we we tried to name it, we tried to own it. Yeah, it exists. They carry the musical pig.

[14:27] Chris Adams: What is it with British American musical theater? There are at least two musicals I can think of that feature an animatronic pig.

[14:34] Holly Morgan: What's the other one?

[14:36] Chris Adams: Betty Blue Eyes.

[14:37] Holly Morgan: Ever come over to see to the US?

[14:39] Chris Adams: No, I don't think so.

[14:41] Holly Morgan: You didn't miss out, I'm gonna be honest.

[14:43] Chris Adams: But maybe there's an Animal Farm the musical that I'm not aware of as well.

[14:48] Holly Morgan: But uh maybe or Charlotte's Webb.

[14:50] Chris Adams: Charlotte's Webb.

[14:51] Holly Morgan: Oh, that'd be lovely. Well, if they need a pig, we know a guy, so I was just gonna say so. Rebecca did not have a pig, but there were there were a couple of things that were similar between Rebecca and Out for and uh excuse me, and Carrie that I I think we should touch upon.

[15:11] Blake Ross: Yeah. One of which I just mentioned to Chris before you got on, Holly. And I'll tell it again. One of which was apparently I did not know this, but the great Betty Buckley was somehow at some point in time involved in Rebecca, and she's got dirt to spill.

[15:36] Chris Adams: Get her on the line.

[15:37] Blake Ross: I'm gonna call her up right now. Betty!

[15:39] Chris Adams: Yes!

[15:39] Blake Ross: Well, I did. I she tweeted at me. I know Betty for a long time. Um, she tweeted at me and said, I have to tell you my story about Rebecca, of which I had no idea that she was involved. Because if you think about it, she was involved in Carrie. She was involved in Sunset Boulevard, which is another great podcast, The Sunset Project, which also had its own craziness abound about it. And now Rebecca, like Betty Buckley can't catch a break with these crazy people, crazy producers, crazy directors. So sh but I never got to the bottom of it. I'm filming. I'll take, I'll tell you next time I'm in New York. So Betty Buckley, if you're listening, lunch on me.

[16:24] Chris Adams: Yeah. We need to talk about Rebecca ASAP. Get the tea.

[16:28] Blake Ross: She's not only in the Carrie musical, but obviously before that, she was in the movie too. So she's like the she's longtime Carrie aficionado.

[16:37] Holly Morgan: So that's some strange congruence between the two principles. There's also um, you know, big staircase.

[16:46] Chris Adams: Yes.

[16:46] Holly Morgan: Yes. Big staircase. Very important. Rebecca's staircase was to be set ablaze. And one of the things I found out during my research, interestingly enough, about Rebecca, which you Londoners might find interesting, is so originally Rebecca was supposed to play the Shaftsbury Theatre in London. Oh and when it did a whole reading at Gerwood Studios with Sierra Boggess, which had its own craziness and was really weird, and they fired some people and brought people in from Germany. It was a very weird reading. And if you haven't listened to Burnt, it's in episode one about like the craziness around that weird reading. But they were supposed to go at into the Shaftsbury. They brought this massive, they were they were doing some work to this, uh the ground level of the Shaftsbury to see if they could bring in this massive staircase that they end up having these crazy pyrotechnics around. They excavate part of the Shaftsbury and hit a pipe, and the pipe floods the basement.

[17:55] Chris Adams: Oh wow.

[17:56] Holly Morgan: Not only now you're like, okay, well, it's you know, we'll do some repairs and keep going. No, no, no. They backed out. What I found is they did not move forward with it because allegedly they found ruins underneath, like Roman ruins underneath the Shaftsbury Theatre. And they were like, Well, we don't want to deal with that. Like, you, you know, like once you deal with ruins under your theater, you're kind of screwed. So they just were like, nope, next.

[18:32] Chris Adams: Oh, wow. That's crazy.

[18:34] Holly Morgan: And like you don't want to do you think they unleashed an ancient curse, maybe?

[18:40] Blake Ross: Probably. I don't know what's playing there now. Juliet and Julia and Juliet, and it's doing quite well, right?

[18:46] Chris Adams: Yeah, but actually, the Shaftsbury does have a bit of a reputation until recently of hosting a lot of flops. It's kind of uh Bat Boy was there. Like there have been a lot of short-lived things in the Shaftsbury. And I think it's kind of shaking it off a bit recently because yeah, and Juliette's been around a while and they had hairspray there for years and stuff. But Motown was there for Motown was there a long time. But I think there was a series of like three or four month runs of big musicals that were just way too big for this, way too small for this big fat theatre. So I think they probably invoked some kind of Roman curse on the place.

[19:20] Blake Ross: Almost certainly. Well, next the next episode of this weird crossover will be me flying to London and the three of us going to the Shaftsbury and saging it and bringing like mediums in to call the ghosts of whoever is haunting that place.

[19:37] Holly Morgan: It would be amazing.

[19:39] Blake Ross: So we have okay, so we have staircases which we have Betty Buckley, we have staircases.

[19:45] Chris Adams: Yeah.

[19:46] Blake Ross: Which Carrie has an enormous staircase.

[19:49] Chris Adams: Yes, it does.

[19:50] Blake Ross: It ends with a giant staircase descending from the heavens as a big kind of expensive metaphor for something.

[19:56] Chris Adams: Yes.

[19:57] Blake Ross: Okay. What's your thing? What's the third connection?

[19:59] Chris Adams: Runaway producers.

[20:01] Blake Ross: Runaway.

[20:01] Chris Adams: Yes.

[20:02] Blake Ross: Yes.

[20:03] Chris Adams: Remind me the name of yours.

[20:06] Blake Ross: Friedrich? Was that his name?

[20:06] Chris Adams: Friedrich.

[20:08] Blake Ross: Fritz Kirk.

[20:10] Chris Adams: Fritz.

[20:11] Blake Ross: Yes. Yeah. I think Fritz is a short shortened version of Friedrich, maybe. Can any German people come confirm? But um, yeah, so basically he was like a commercial producer who got involved in the Broadway run of Carrie. And when he saw the terrible reviews, he panicked and closed, allegedly panicked and closed the bank accounts and fled back to Germany and was never seen again.

[20:34] Chris Adams: Really, uh yeah, really quite quite cool.

[20:39] Blake Ross: Did you find if anyone got paid? Did you find if like uh people got paid or people got stiffed?

[20:44] Chris Adams: That's a good point. I think they got paid, didn't they?

[20:46] Blake Ross: Yeah, I think they got paid. You have to put up like the equity bond and stuff like that. So like you have to prove that you have the money. But I wonder, like there for sure there must have been people who were screwed.

[20:55] Chris Adams: Yeah. I mean, it was all a bit cloudy and um hard to kind of dig into the exactly what happened. And it was also sudden, you know. It it was literally five, you know, uh five minutes later, it was it was closed within a week or two of opening, and everyone just went home. And because it was this kind of half British cast, half of them went back to the UK, half of them spread around the world. And it was just, yeah, it was. I imagine I think they all got paid for the work that they did, but that was it. You know, they're expecting to be there a year or so, and yeah, they were going a week.

[21:27] Holly Morgan: Is he still alive, Fritz?

[21:29] Chris Adams: He is, right?

[21:30] Blake Ross: He thinks where aware. Yeah, but I think now quite old and somewhere in Germany, and we weren't able to track him down. We'd love to have a chat for it if you're out.

[21:39] Chris Adams: Oh my gosh, yeah. Fritz, reach out.

[21:40] Blake Ross: Did he ever do any other like shows?

[21:44] Chris Adams: Yes.

[21:45] Blake Ross: So he did. So he went back to work in Germany. Yeah, he famously produced um Starlight Express in Germany. Um, and that's been running ever since. It's still running in the same purpose-built venue. They love it. And I think he was one of the original producers. I don't know how involved he is now in that, but yeah, it's still going.

[22:04] Holly Morgan: Well, that's our fourth connection is Germany, because that's where Rebecca started. It started in Germany, and it became this big hit. It's uh by Sylvester LeVay and Michael Kunze, who was famously a part of another classic flop on Broadway Dance of the Vampires. And Rebecca was supposed to be his big redemption story. I mean, talk about the antithesis of that. But it ran in Germany for a long time, was a big hit. That's where Ben Sprecher and Luis Ferlenza, his other producer, um, the other lead producer for Rebecca, found it and thought that this was like their ticket to the big leagues. And they found it in Germany. It was Rebecca Das musical.

[22:53] Chris Adams: Amazing.

[22:54] Blake Ross: So that's our fourth one. And then I guess number five would be kind of Miss Danvers and a bridge too.

[23:07] Chris Adams: I was gonna say, like Miss Danvers and Kevin.

[23:10] Holly Morgan: Margaret White's mom, the Margaret White connection of these women sort of possessed with this otherworldliness about them. And also like uh a musical about a woman of a or not about, but like having a star that is a woman of a certain age, quote unquote, if you will, that like doesn't really exist so much anymore.

[23:31] Chris Adams: Yeah, I think I did I think that's it, that's a thematic link at least that we can say is there, definitely.

[23:38] Blake Ross: Slightly unhinged, mature lines.

[23:42] Chris Adams: Slightly kind of psychosexual vibes as well.

[23:45] Blake Ross: Ooh, yes, we are yes. Well, speaking of psychosexual vibes, and speaking of that's us. Should we take a quick break?

[23:55] Holly Morgan: Yeah, good idea, yes.

[23:57] Blake Ross: What a segue. Who do you think the advertisers are this week?

[24:03] Chris Adams: They're gonna be real happy with that, right?

[24:08] Blake Ross: So 10% off the following product or service. We'll be back after.

[24:12] Holly Morgan: Okay, we'll take a break.

[24:16] Blake Ross: Hooray, we're back.

[24:19] Chris Adams: Did you buy a Casper mattress with the code psychosexual?

[24:25] Blake Ross: This podcast may or may not be transported by Casper Mattress. Uh thank you to our generous advertisers. Um Blake, do you think there's a future for Rebecca anywhere in the world?

[24:37] Blake Ross: Are we likely to see a performance of Rebecca anytime soon?

[24:42] Chris Adams: Well, the difference between me and Rebecca and you guys and Carrie is you guys found this musical and loved it.

[24:54] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[24:55] Chris Adams: Whereas I fell in love with the story enough to want to investigate it. And then I watched a bootleg version of the German musical with subtitles.

[25:08] Blake Ross: Now, that's a very difficult way to take in a musical.

[25:12] Chris Adams: Yeah. But I just don't necessarily think it was that great of a show. It was Euro Poppy to the max. And the theme of it, this young, naive little fawn in the wood unnamed girl who falls in love lickety split with this dashing mysterious man and he whisks her off to his mansion where this old woman is like keeping the flame of his ex-wife alive or dead wife alive.

[25:50] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[25:50] Chris Adams: I just was it doesn't necessarily like feel like the most relevant nowadays. I mean, literally an unnamed woman. I think it could I mean it there's enough there with the fact that that's what Carrie sold on a couple of years ago when they did that off-Broadway version of it. There was such lore built around it that people just wanted to see it.

[26:12] Blake Ross: So I think an enterprising producer could come along and maybe try and find a way to bring it back to life and use the catalyst of the crazy, crazy press that it got before to try and like, you know, build it into something. But I think it would fundamentally, I don't know that it was such a great show, to be completely honest with you.

[26:36] Chris Adams: Right.

[26:37] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[26:38] Chris Adams: It was basically like a bootleg Phantom. The way that it was produced, like there's a masquerade ball in it. Literally the act one beginning is a masquerade ball. I was like, what? You did a not as good as Phantom masquerade ball. Or you did like Miss Danvers was kind of like a phantom without a mask and a woman. It was just a there's a lot of like, huh? So I don't know. I don't know.

[27:04] Blake Ross: And do you think that's what keeps it alive then in people's imaginations? Is just the kind of Schadenfreude of it all? Like, I can't believe they did that. Or all the people who are just who still love it. I mean, there's clearly an audience for it in Germany.

[27:18] Chris Adams: Well, there's productions before the pandemic, it was going back to Asia, doing another Asian tour. It became like the best-selling tour in Seoul in Korea. It's played a bunch of different, so it's got a life out there. You know, not everybody needs to come to Broadway to be successful. In fact, most aren't successful and can find life outside of it.

[27:43] Holly Morgan: Um but I do think it's Schadenfreude a bit. I think that's like I said, I think it's a little bit of what made Carrie so appealing years later was seeing what Stafford Arima, right?

[27:58] Chris Adams: It was Stafford Arima?

[27:59] Holly Morgan: Yeah, yeah. Who redid it just to see what somebody could do with this notoriously failed musical. It's like, who's gonna do Moose Murders? Because you know it's coming. Like everybody loves a great redemption story. So I don't, I never say never with certainly with Rebecca, because you never know. But it won't be Ben Sprecher doing it, that's for sure.

[28:20] Blake Ross: It's interesting what you say, because we spoke to Stafford a lot in the podcast, and you know, he obviously had that challenge that people did want to come and see a car crash because they'd heard all about this disastrous show, and he was faced with this challenge of reimagining it and you know, getting people to come and see it just for the sake of it being a great show and a great story.

[28:40] Chris Adams: And I think you know he they felt like they achieved that and I think it was a very different show in the end. And I always kind of wonder it was a smaller show, it was much more kind of almost like a chamber version of the show. And I kind of wonder if a lot of the problems that these kind of shows face is because they were trying to be too big originally.

[29:01] Blake Ross: You know, that Carrie came about in the late 80s in the wake of stuff like, you know, Phantom and Les Mis and Cats and those big massive musicals. And I think almost the creators were trying to match the scale and the scope of those shows and kind of went a bit over their heads with it, which sounds a bit like what happened with Rebecca, and you kind of wonder if they if they'd scaled their ideas down a little bit and started a bit smaller, rather than trying to create the next massive show, maybe it would have gone somewhere.

[29:33] Chris Adams: It's hard to know.

[29:34] Blake Ross: Yeah, I think tastes change and when it was to come onto Broadway, it was 2012, and so it was around that time, you know, with Spider-Man and all the where people were trying to they you know, people are always trying to find the next, you know, best thing. Now it's the next Hamilton. It's like how can we how can we set a new genre that is you know like the rents of the world and for Rebecca I think it just it came at the wrong time it just outli it Ben Sprecher just maybe un the art of it got away from him and he was trying to make something that maybe 20 years prior would have been a big hit but in 2012 people just weren't into it.

[30:24] Chris Adams: I don't know he did sell a million dollars worth of tickets but it's not that much these days a million dollars not that much worth of a pre-sale so I don't know how popular it would be I mean I would love to see it broken down as a in like a chamber setting because I think some of those you know gothic thriller type shows really play well when you get this like when you have this really intimate moment I really enjoyed Stafford's Carrie um you guys saw it right?

[30:24] Holly Morgan: We did yeah we had alpha yeah of course we did we were like the tickets right of course who am I talking to right but it was I really enjoyed it I thought it was great I mean Marin Mazzie my goodness gracious what a performance yeah what amazing one of those performances you just remember forever like totally and I think if you have these like I'm I am in love with the divas of the stage who just sing the shit out of a song in your face.

[31:23] Chris Adams: And I think a character like a Mrs. Danvers or a Margaret White or a Norma Desmond or whatever, and they're just like emoting and belting in your face, like to do that in a smaller setting. Wow, I think it would be amazing.

[31:39] Blake Ross: So who in the world knows?

[31:41] Chris Adams: Yeah. Maybe we should like form a production company that just does tiny tiny versions of class.

[31:49] Holly Morgan: Wonderland, we're coming for you.

[31:52] Chris Adams: Let's do it.

[31:53] Holly Morgan: What was the pig musical?

[31:55] Chris Adams: Betty Blue Eyes.

[31:57] Holly Morgan: Betty Blue Eyes.

[31:57] Chris Adams: Yeah.

[31:59] Holly Morgan: They're coming for you guys.

[32:00] Chris Adams: Yeah, they have to have a pig.

[32:02] Holly Morgan: Mystifyingly popular.

[32:04] Chris Adams: Yeah, it did quite well, didn't it?

[32:05] Holly Morgan: Yeah, it did, yeah. I think Kylie Minogue was the voice of the pig in the world.

[32:08] Chris Adams: She was.

[32:08] Holly Morgan: Yeah, there was a number about podiatry in it. It was a very strange piece.

[32:13] Chris Adams: I must have blocked it out.

[32:15] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[32:16] Chris Adams: I must have blocked it out. We talked to um we talked to the wonderful creator of Desperately Seeking Susan in our show. I don't know if you're familiar with Desperately Seeking Susan, the musical, not the movie.

[32:27] Holly Morgan: Um Peter Michael Moreno, who wrote this hilarious great musical based on the movie, which obviously stars Madonna, but he used the songs of Blondie.

[32:39] Chris Adams: And um it was a similar kind of um unraveling to Carrie in that they decided to stage it in the UK first, and it was very British, a very American story, and it all went horribly wrong and it closed.

[32:50] Holly Morgan: And he is, if you get the chance, Blake, to speak to Peter, he lives in New York. He's just has such hilarious stories about Desperately Seeking Susan and the making of a musical that is just cursed and doomed.

[33:02] Chris Adams: Um but yeah, I just think maybe there was there's no pig in it, but we could maybe produce that as part of our new job.

[33:10] Blake Ross: Absolutely. Well, through the course of this, I don't know if this happened to you, but so many people were throwing other crazy stories at me.

[33:21] Chris Adams: Yeah, one of the craziest ones um that I got, one of which I told on a bonus episode, was about um what is the world was his name? Norman Keene, that was his name. He was a producer of um Calcutta. You know the O Calcutta, the mu the like original 70s musical where are they all stripped and it was like a big thing in the day because there's like naked and hair and all of that.

[33:47] Holly Morgan: Yeah.

[33:47] Chris Adams: Uh anyway, he ended up killing his wife and killing himself.

[33:54] Holly Morgan: Oh my god.

[33:55] Chris Adams: Oh wow. And his suicide note said, please take care of my show and make sure it still runs.

[34:05] Holly Morgan: Oh wow.

[34:06] Chris Adams: Oh no. That's intense.

[34:09] Holly Morgan: Crazy, right?

[34:10] Chris Adams: That is super intense. But people are just, I mean, out of the woodwork. Like, I don't know if you remember the the bird, there's there's a new Burt Bacharach musical. My crap, I should be prepared for this.

[34:21] Holly Morgan: But the Burt Bacharach music.

[34:23] Chris Adams: No, I'm sorry.

[34:24] Holly Morgan: Barry Manilow musical.

[34:26] Chris Adams: Oh, okay.

[34:28] Holly Morgan: Because he there is Captain Gabbana, right?

[34:31] Chris Adams: Yeah.

[34:32] Holly Morgan: Barry Manilow.

[34:34] Chris Adams: Yes. Um he was doing, so he's bringing it back now. It's called Harmony, but it was supposed to be produced like 10 or 20, I don't know, 15 years ago.

[34:44] Holly Morgan: And basically, the producer ended up doing kind of like a Fritz thing, except it never actually got to the stage.

[34:52] Chris Adams: But Lo is like try like got the musical halfway there, and then it got it into the, I think as close to like an out-of-town tryout, and then just disappeared.

[35:01] Holly Morgan: And was like, actually, I'm not gonna do this show anymore.

[35:04] Chris Adams: Just left. So I'm getting so many crazy stories. Have you guys gotten any like hot tips on crazy theater stories?

[35:11] Holly Morgan: Oh, we've had a few. After people listen to the pod. I think lucky, we just get hit by lists of flops all the time.

[35:18] Chris Adams: Yeah.

[35:19] Holly Morgan: Flops that people want to hear about. Because people aren't really sure that they're like, oh, you can do another series, and are you gonna do this, something the other? We're like, well, we don't know, but yeah, it's it's kind of yeah, people hit you with what they really like you to get the tea on.

[35:33] Chris Adams: We're like, we we kind of did the flop.

[35:37] Holly Morgan: Yeah, we I know you could do Dance of the Vampires, that was yeah, that would be good.

[35:43] Chris Adams: Or the um define one, isn't it, that has as much of a story as Carrie behind it. Like it's it's an epic voyage, definitely.

[35:51] Holly Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, dare we talk dare we talk about the the D word, the the Diana word.

[35:57] Chris Adams: I mean, which as of this recording is still on.

[36:02] Holly Morgan: Not to not be.

[36:03] Chris Adams: It is the strangest thing. Now, Diana is very interesting because it came, it came of an age of the pandemic age, right?

[36:12] Holly Morgan: And we're gonna see in a few years how this whole period of time shakes out for the theater.

[36:20] Chris Adams: But so because it was supposed to come on like right before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic, got this whole Netflix deal, which was people were like, What?

[36:29] Holly Morgan: Yeah, but they're had that streaming Netflix deal, and then they opened and got the worst reviews ever.

[36:37] Chris Adams: And it's at a time where they're not reporting grosses, so you can't really tell how the show is doing and if it will get the mythical, like hate watching that people want to go and see something that was so terribly reviewed.

[36:54] Holly Morgan: I don't know.

[36:55] Chris Adams: Yeah, I haven't bought tickets for it. It just really struck me because a couple of the reviews, like you mentioned, actually call out Carrie and say, you know, is this the new Carrie? Is this the Carrie of our time? You know, will people keep the playbill in a frame because they saw Diana? And you kind of think, oh my God, people have thrown their lives into the show.

[37:15] Holly Morgan: Yeah, I know. That is what I, you know, I walked away with a lot. Like there is this mystery around so much of it because in the theater, we're not very good at spilling the tea. You know, very few people care about our tea, I guess I should say. A select few care about our tea. So it's like, and it's complicated tea and it's dramatic tea, but it's an insular, it's a small world. It's not like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, where it's like splashed on every magazine cover. It's just like a small, you know, little world of gossipy people that mostly keep it to themselves.

[37:53] Blake Ross: So I don't I don't know, but it's so fascinating to me the amount of people who have like reached out to me about other little stories about other producers who didn't do right by their shows, about ongoing things that are happening now that people, you know, want to get out there in the world. And I think one of the big takeaways for me is I'm sure it was for you, because I could tell in some of the episodes that you guys put out, was like, sure, the stories behind it are so interesting, but also there's people because of the nature of the work, and because you have to put so much time, effort, and your career and your livelihood into the making of a show. It takes so long to just do a show that you could really get burnt in the end.

Like the people from Rebecca put so much time and effort into it and for their careers just to go for like a whole year waiting for other shows to come around because they got completely screwed. Like there's a lot of people holding the bag in these bail disasters, you know.

[38:57] Chris Adams: So it is kind of it you know I always like I it's hard it must be hard to be critic I guess knowing that you're taking down because you're so much more connected to it I guess than like a movie star you know like oh you take down a Chris Pine movie. It's like he's gonna be okay.

[39:13] Holly Morgan: I think we like found that a bit with with some of the original cast members of Carrie didn't we really kind of it really shook them what happened to them. They were young and they'd never been involved in anything of that scale before some of them and it really affected them. I think even until very recently I think seeing that revival production for a lot of them was a big turning point because they kind of you know they they got to watch the show and and see it almost redeeming itself and it was kind of like a a bit of closure some of them were kind of suggesting to us.

[39:46] Blake Ross: Have you had people that didn't want to talk to because it was like too painful of an of a thing to go back to?

[39:46] Holly Morgan: Yeah, a bit yeah I think we did we we kind of convinced a few people to take part who weren't originally quite sure because you know we we didn't I think they were so used to the show being mocked and being laughed at and we really made a point of of trying our best to treat it respectfully and and kind of talking about it from the perspective of fans and and theater fans. We didn't want to kind of, you know, it it's it's hard because there are some really silly parts of the show that you kind of can't help but laugh at.

[40:24] Chris Adams: And I think, but I think in a loving way, right?

[40:27] Holly Morgan: Oh, yeah. We just tried to keep snark out of it, didn't we? We was like, we we that's not what we were here for, really. Because it's it like the stories themselves, it doesn't need it. The stories themselves are so interesting.

[40:39] Blake Ross: Yeah, exactly. So you can come to your own conclusion. I mean, the animatronic pig, you could maybe have a little bit of snark about.

[40:45] Holly Morgan: Yeah, I mean, like the unitard, like you we just relay the information, but as you say, Blake, it's the human cost, isn't it? It's the collateral of these artists who've given up their time and their energy to something, and it's cruel to laugh at them and be like, you stupid people, you should have realized that it wasn't totally totally.

[41:03] Blake Ross: I won't say who, but I had a number of people that didn't want to talk to me. Um, but that got back to me and were just like, I can't, it's still too painful. I think also because there was a whole, you know, my part of it, then also delve into you know, Ben Sprecker's whole life imploded after this thing. He ended up getting arrested for child pornography, and the whole like, you know, he that took such a dark turn that I think people were so like yeah, like, you know, this man that they worked with and for, who was so deep, they were you know, the cast and the crew were so deeply on his side because of this craziness that happened, and then to find out that this thing happened at the same time, it was so disturbing to a lot to a lot of people that were involved that they just were like, I can't get into it. But there's but so I and then of course I deeply respect that. I totally understand.

[42:00] Chris Adams: Um, but who knows? It's picked up wind too. There's an online documentary now about Rebecca and the story, similar to what Burnt is, but leaving out the part about Ben Sprecker, which is a little weird. But you know, I mean, look, these stories become mythical and they they build up steam on their own. Like, I mean, we're talking still talking about Carrie, which hasn't had a production. What's the last time it's had like a big production?

[42:26] Holly Morgan: I know you guys went through touched on a little bit, but there's nothing coming up for Carrie that you can tell, right?

[42:31] Chris Adams: Not that we're aware of.

[42:32] Holly Morgan: Yeah, if someone is planning a big revival, please tell us because we'd like to know.

[42:38] Chris Adams: Um, I think the last time we saw the show, well, 2016, I think there was a sort of fair. In the Southern Southern Playhouse here in London. And at the same time, there was a big immersive production over in California.

[42:49] Holly Morgan: Um which was really that must have been so cool.

[42:52] Chris Adams: Oh, it looks so cool. Yeah, everyone we talked to was like, oh my god, did you see that production?

[42:57] Holly Morgan: Um, because they completely kind of blew it up and and tore it to bits, and they had people flying through the air, and they had, you know, I think they had a dead pig as well. I think they had a pig that you could kind of go take a selfie with.

[43:10] Chris Adams: So yeah, I think those they were the last kind of big ones. But there were productions happening all over the world all the time. And um I remember Stafford told us he was in Russia for something else, a different project, and he saw this poster on a wall, and obviously couldn't read it, it was in Russian, but he recognized it immediately from the imagery that it was a production of Carrie. And he went to see this kind of tiny, intimate Russian Carrie in a basement somewhere.

[43:29] Holly Morgan: Oh my gosh.

[43:34] Chris Adams: And just loved it because it was just so kind of pure and and and Russian. Um so yeah, I mean, it's it's just everywhere now. At one point you could not produce Carrie for love nor money, you know, the rights were just not a thing you could ever get hold of. And now it's like every school, every community set, you know, it's it's which is which is part of the story we tell and how that happened. It's it's amazing.

[43:58] Blake Ross: Yeah. Well, Rebecca, if there's any enterprising producers out there that feel that Rebecca might enjoy the same kind of immersive production. I'm happy to offer my thoughts and opinions on it. You could like climb up the burning staircase to get to your seats.

[44:15] Chris Adams: Oh my god. That well, that was another unsubstantiated rumor that I heard about the New York production, but that after all that they were gonna try the last ditch effort was that they were gonna actually bring Rebecca in, but nix the staircase. Can you imagine?

[44:31] Holly Morgan: Nix the whole fire, and that was it. I'm like, how do you nix the fire? But you know, you never know. Stafford did it without the blood. And I thought it was a great production, so you never know.

[44:43] Blake Ross: You never know. We could have a projected staircase. Crazy.

[44:47] Chris Adams: Well, guys, I think we did it.

[44:47] Holly Morgan: We did it!

[44:54] Blake Ross: So tell the people that are Bert fans here where they can find Out For Blood. Had have they if they are the few people who have missed out on Out For Blood, where can they find it?

[45:04] Chris Adams: Ah, you can find it on your favorite podcast app or on BPN. Um, yeah, wherever you get your pods, we'll be there. Definitely.

[45:12] Holly Morgan: And and you can we posted tons of fun stuff on social while we were doing the show as well. So Out for Blood Podcast on Instagram and Out for Blood Pod on Twitter. There's loads of like photos that cast members gave us and loads of cool like little behind the scenes things. So if you start listening, kind of scroll back to the the beginning of our social and follow along week by week as we can.

[45:33] Blake Ross: Yeah, your Instagram is very good. I need to get better about that, but your Instagram is very, very good. Ever anything that's equivalent to Carrie, I'm like, wow. I didn't know that.

[45:44] Holly Morgan: I'm like, where can people, if they haven't managed to find Burnt, the good listeners of Out for Blood would like to hear where they can download it, please.

[45:53] Blake Ross: You can go to burntbroadway.com and you can find all the episodes there, the original series, and then some of my bonus episodes where I talk about all the rest of the crazy stories, like the Norman Keene story that I told. Uh I talked to Sunset uh to the Sunset Projects Broadway Bob about the craziness surrounding the sunset uh Sunset Boulevard, uh, you know, the Shia LaBeouf getting arrested at cabaret, yeah, uh Patty Lapone and who the real person was, who she yelled at and threw out of the theater.

[46:29] Holly Morgan: I love that story.

[46:31] Blake Ross: It was just hilarious. Isn't it such a good story? But there's so many crazy scandals, but I will put a call out to both you guys and listeners of this podcast if you've made it this far. If you have a favorite scandal of the stage, and I haven't talked about it yet, please Instagram me, Blake Ross NY, or you can find it on burntbroadway.com. I want to know about it because I'm still looking for new stuff to talk about. There's so many crazy stories. I mean, like, we haven't even gotten to Spider-Man yet, but it will come.

[47:06] Chris Adams: Oh, Spider-Man.

[47:09] Holly Morgan: Send in your flops, send us your flop.

[47:11] Blake Ross: Send us your flops, send it exactly. Send in your flops or never words.

[47:17] Holly Morgan: Well, I think that's about it. We should do the we should do the credits and stuff, right? We've got two sets of credits to roll.

[47:22] Chris Adams: Yes.

[47:22] Holly Morgan: But I mean, if you want to meet us in person, we'll probably all be hanging out at the Shaftesbury Theatre with some say some Bibles or something. Our special live edition of this crossover event at the in the basement of the Shaftsbury Theater. Trying to revoke the curse.

[47:42] Blake Ross: Well, Blake, it's been amazing to speak to you.

[47:45] Chris Adams: Yes, I'm so glad we made it to the end, you guys.

[47:47] Holly Morgan: We did it!

[47:48] Blake Ross: Looks like we made it.

[47:51] Chris Adams: Speaking of Barry Manilow.

[47:54] Holly Morgan: Well, here we go. Out for Blood is hosted and produced by me, Chris Adams.

[47:59] Holly Morgan: And me, Holly Morgan, with editing by Tom Moores, audio consulting by Patty Jervis, original music by Odin Orn Hillmarsen, and Rebecca Pitt is responsible for all of our beautiful imagery.

[48:10] Blake Ross: And Burnt is reported and produced by me and edited by the fabulous Alan Seales and our gal pal Brittany Bigelow. She's my co-producer, Dori Berenstein. And special thanks to the great Philip Boroff and this special episode, my new friends Chris and Holly.

[48:34] Blake Ross: So excited to do this from the comfort of my uh wonderful closet slash studio.

[48:40] Chris Adams: Yeah, I better leave my professional podcasts recording soon.

[48:44] Blake Ross: Can you breathe?

[48:47] Chris Adams: Exactly.

[48:48] Blake Ross: Thanks, guys.

[48:49] Holly Morgan: Thanks for joining everybody.

[48:51] Chris Adams: Thank you, everybody.

[48:53] Blake Ross: Bye.

[48:58] Chris Adams: For sources and more information on the Rebecca scandal, visit bpn.fm/burnt.