Carrie: The Musical
In the fluorescent corridors of high school, cruelty can look ordinary—until it gathers force.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
In the fluorescent corridors of high school, cruelty can look ordinary—until it gathers force. Carrie: The Musical takes that familiar menace and turns it into something operatic, intimate and terrifying: a story about a girl who wants, above all, to be seen, and a community that discovers too late what it has helped create.
Adapted from Stephen King’s novel, the musical follows Carrie White, a shy teenager hemmed in by the taunts of her classmates and the suffocating religious extremism of her mother. Music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen give the story a heightened emotional vocabulary, moving from quiet unease to soaring, sometimes jagged intensity. At its center is the prom-night prank that pushes Carrie past the limits of endurance—and awakens a power capable of changing the lives of everyone around her.
The production arrives at a moment when conversations about belonging, adolescent isolation and the consequences of public humiliation feel especially urgent. In a region celebrated for its cultural abundance, Sarasota audiences have long embraced theater not only as entertainment but as a way to examine the difficult machinery of human behavior. Carrie offers no easy distance from its characters. Its bullies are recognizably human, its adults are flawed, and its central tragedy grows from the small failures of empathy that can become catastrophic when left unchecked.
That tension also makes the musical an intriguing fit for the Manatee Performing Arts Center, a venue whose programming serves audiences throughout the greater Sarasota-Manatee arts community. Housed at the Florida Cultural Group, Inc., the center provides a home for live performance close to the cultural corridor shared by the two counties. Here, a story built around a high school gymnasium, a prom and the volatile emotions of youth can take on the immediacy of theater at its best: bodies in a room, voices raised in real time, and an audience confronting its own reactions together.
Dark, dramatic and threaded with a contemporary score, Carrie: The Musical is less a ghost story than a warning about what happens when kindness is treated as optional. The performance takes place Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at the Florida Cultural Group, Inc., also known as the Manatee Performing Arts Center, 502 Third Avenue West.