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Carrie, laid to rest in 1988 after five frenetic, critically damned performances at the then-Virginia Theatre, has risen, and (as is her wont) risen with a vengeance!

Full of zap and sass, nostrils flared, she's out to smite those who would persecute her, this time starting small — Off-Broadway, in a production by MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Carrie began anew on Jan. 31, towards a March 1 opening, with revisions by its original creators (composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford and book writer Lawrence D. Cohen).

Somehow, crossing the pond to England in 1988, this premise was hijacked and fell into the hands of British director Terry Hands, who shoehorned the story into the sort of bloody spectacle that was then in vogue (think The Phantom of the High School).

The Royal Shakespeare Company threw $8 million at the show while Hands ripped huge clumps of dialogue out at a time, creating a sing-through.

Soon, the authors had trouble recognizing on stage what they had wrought and opted to avert their eyes, stepping collectively into the lobby till the moment passed. When the show crossed back over the pond to Broadway, it lasted for 16 previews and five performances before succumbing to scathing reviews and closing.

	Linzi Hateley and Betty Buckley in the original Broadway production
	photo by Peter Cunningham

Few know who manhandled Carrie, but it's easy to Google its authors, who (save for a smattering of stuff from Pitchford) never wrote for Broadway again.

Over the years, in the minds of theatregoers, Carrie replaced Kelly as the new Moose Murders of musicals. Cinching that title, theatre journalist Ken Mandelbaum named his tome on 40 years of Broadway musical flops "Not Since Carrie."

Thus, the startling resurrection of Carrie in 2012 amounts to a minor miracle. You can actually blame Canada for it: Stafford Arima, the show's current director, was 19 when he and his mother motored down from Toronto to catch a matinee preview of Carrie and evening performance of M. Butterfly.

She was, obviously, quite a modern mom — and before she died in 2008, Arima thanked her for the "wonderful legacy of theatre she exposed me to over the years. I said, 'We're probably the only people in Canada who actually saw Carrie.'"

That started him thinking. "In the show she's a misunderstood girl, and in many ways this piece was misunderstood because it didn't survive very long. I asked my agent to find out about it. He said, 'It opened, it closed and the authors have no interest in reopening it.' I said, 'Well, I'd love to just take a meeting with them.'"

This came to pass in the fall of 2008. "I met them, sat down in a room and, for eight hours, explained why I felt the material had potency and needed to be re-looked at.

"That's where the idea was born, in 2008. Then jump-cut to 2012 — it's taken that long of a period to just get back into it, to re-explore it, to re-investigate it, to re-invent it. The reason we're talking about Carrie now is because it's a timeless, universal story about what it means to be different, to be an outsider."