by Felix Barker
2/21/88

It has been a frantic, improbable, alarming week in the theatre.

I lived with a man in a Russian pigsty for ten years. A derlict roller-skating rink on America's Atlantic seaboard was demolished in front of my eyes.

I have watched a group of New England high school children perish in a bloody, supernatural holocaust.

That's entertainment 1988.

In reverse order, CARRIE is the musical fashioned out of Stephen King's horror novel and the Sissy Spacek movie.

It has taken off with a mind-blowing premiere at the Royal Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon.

With a half-British, half-American cast this quasi-religious parable shows you what a group of clever people can do if they have six-million dollars to burn.

You may recall the story is about a 16-year-old ugly duckling Carrie who takes a terrible revenge on the fellow classmates who spurn her.

It's a production in dazzling white and blood-stained red in which director Terry Hands and designer Ralph Koltai knock your eyes out. It makes an instant star out of a 17-year-old Birmingham girl Linzi Hateley and the glitter girls and leather lads outdo Chorus Line.

No one will understand the obscure mythology of this story. Or much mind.

Warwickshire will be besieged in the coming month. Broadway, where it goes in April, will topple. London'd total ammolation is only a matter of time.