While eye-rollingly ridiculous, the Egyptian sequence was at least not as laugh-out-loud funny as the Broadway ending you mentioned above (which is the one I saw). The NYC ending registered mostly as "We Give Up!"
From what I'd gathered at the time, it was improved to the extent that it was made worse, so went from cringingly bad to hilariously awful. I reveled in it--this was my own personal Not Since Carrie moment. Everything about it, down to the most minute detail (e.g. the positioning of actors when being bitten), was a bad, bad choice.
