Lestat the Musical: a Postmortem Broadway Review

If you’re an Anne Rice purist, Lestat the Musical (based off of the “Vampire Chronicles” series of novels) might not be for you. If, on the other hand, you like your shambling legions of the undead gay and belting out the pop music of Elton John, you might find the show engaging.

Either way, your chances of actually seeing it are slim, because it closed on Broadway in 2006, after just thirty-three previews and thirty-nine performances, never again to rise from its dusty grave.

I saw it!

I saw it six times!!

I saw it in all of its tonally weird, inexplicable, so-bad-it’s-good glory. I saw it because I was a broke college student and the tickets were cheap, because it made me smile, and because I wanted to.

And you know what? I’d do it again.

For me, the first preview of Lestat the Musical, at Broadway’s Palace Threatre, was a highly anticipated event….!

(…which I didn’t go to, ‘cause first previews weren’t in my budget.)

I was still grieving the loss of Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula, and needed another theatrical vampire extravaganza to sink my teeth into. I prepared for the show by reading every Anne Rice book in existence, joining Livejournal discussion groups, and dreaming about the day when the characters I’d met on the page would be put to song.

I managed to catch a the fifth preview of Lestat. It was a chilly day in early March. A friend of mine from England was visiting, so we went together. Part way through the first act, she turned to me whispered:

“Dear god. They’re trying so hard.”

The “they” that she referred to were Lestat’s lead actors: Hugh Panaro in the title role, Carolee Carmello as Gabrielle, Jim Stanek as Louis, Drew Sarich as Armand, and Allison Fischer as Claudia. My friend’s face was awash with sympathy for their plight, and also with horror at the absolute mess she on stage.

Me? I was reveling in it.

A Brief Summary of Lestat

Okay. So. It goes down like this:

Act one. Lestat is young and French. He lives with his dad who hates him. His mom, Gabrielle, sells jewelry and stuff for his betterment. He kills some wolves. He has a friend named Nicolas who likes to sit on his bed barefoot and talk about bears (and bugs).

Nicolas and Lestat go to Paris, where the bells of Notre Dame ring out and people raise up their voices and shout. Lestat is changed into a vampire and grapples emotionally with that. Gabrielle shows up on the brink of death, so he makes her into a vampire too, at which point they become suddenly very enthusiastic about incest. Lestat sings a love song about Nicolas, who he also changes into a vampire. Nicolas, a creature of good good purity who is pure and good, does not make a very competent vampire. He stops talking and gets dragged around like a highly beloved sack of meat, having more or less gone emotionally catatonic.

Armand appears! He is bad! He lies about vampires not being able to go into churches! But! Lestat shows them that they can go into churches! Take that Armand! Also, we discover that Armand was created by a vampire called Marius, who is old and wise.

After a while, Nicolas decides to jump into a fire. There are real flames on the stage, but if you’re in the nosebleed seats, you can see that he’s actually standing behind the them and pretending to writhe.

Gabrielle expresses that she’d like to go off on an international food tour, eating people from different countries, to whom she has assigned flavors based off of their skin color. She and Lestat make out one last time, then he is alone, until…

ACT II!!

Marius! Is! Bald! He’s fishing! He’s fishing in a… little pool of blue light. Using a stick with a string attached. He tells Lestat to go live his life, and also explains that Armand is an obnoxious twatface.

Lestat goes to New Orleans and turns Louis into a vampire. Louis has Existential Dread. Lestat wants him to embrace his life as a vampire.

Embrace it!!! Embrace it!!! Embrace it!!!

When Louis fails to EMBRACE IT, Lestat kidnaps a cute daughter for them to share. That is how child vampire Claudia comes to be. Claudia soon shows herself to have vampire issues. She wants more. MoOOre!

Claudia wants to be a woman, but since she can’t, she and Louis gang up to kill Lestat (unsuccessfully). They go off to Europe to perform with Armand, who has a theatre now.

Lestat (who you will remember, did not successfully die), goes after Louis and Claudia. This cumulates in Armand murdering Claudia (successfully) in a rousing and enthusiastic dance number.

Louis comes to the realization that his passivity is to blame for everything. He passively leaves forever.

Armand shows up to gloat and make out with Lestat, who tells him that Marius said he was a twatface.

“Maaaaarius loooooooooved meeeeeeeeeeeee!” Armand shrieks, pushing Lestat off of a roof.

Here’s where things get exciting:

The show had a different ending each of the first three times I saw it. Clearly the writers were trying to work some stuff out. One ending had Gabrielle showing up to rescue Lestat. Another had Marius. The one that ultimately got used after previews were over had Marius and Gabs conducting a joint rescue mission. There was also a pre-Broadway try-out in San Francisco, which ended with Lestat biting the gold painted bosom and the vampire queen Akasha (a character who did not make it to Broadway).

Why Did Lestat Flop?

I don’t think the plot (messily described above) was to blame. Most of it was similar enough to Anne Rice’s that wildly popular books.

The pacing of the plot most likely played a role. The creative team of Lestat tried to jam two entire novels worth of Vampire Chronicles content into a little over two hours of run time. So much was happening that it was a struggle for audiences who didn’t already know the characters from having read the books to connect with them.

That said, people who were big fans of the Vampire Chronicles books tended to hate the musical. The novels spend a lot of time focused on the physical appearances of the characters, and VC fans didn’t like that lot of the actors didn’t look like the characters they’d been reading about. The book version of Armand, for example, is described as an eternally seventeen-year-old angelic red-head. His actor in the musical, Drew Sarich, was very much an adult man, and he stalked around the stage in a long black wig. None of the characters had fangs, and there was no fake blood. Looks aside, the characters in Lestat the Musical often had wildly different personalities from their book counterparts. Novel!Nicolas is nihilistic and bitter, while the stage version of him was meant to represent innocence and light.

The tone of Lestat the musical was also different from the books. It was playful and bouncy, especially compared to Anne Rice’s gothier-than-thou prose. The lyrics didn‘t always make sense, and at times seemed like an AI generated parody of musical lyrics. Louis called Lestat a “dazzling ghost of infinity’s views” (whatever that meant). A Parisian woman first setting eyes upon Lestat remarked that “the innocence of that sweet smile might cause [her] clothes to disappear”. While serenading Lestat and Louis about the depths of her infernal bloodlust, Claudia declared, “I don’t want your milk and honey, you can keep your finer teas. I don’t need your chocolate hot and sweet. It’s sticky red for me.” Part of enjoying Lestat was simply ignoring that seventy percent of what the characters said made no sense.

During the previews, despite all of its problems, Lestat brought in a pretty full audience. Once the show opened and reviewers got a chance to take their crack at Lestat, it was over. Ben Brantley, New York Times theatre critic and enemy of fun, may have put the final nail in Lestat’s coffin when he implied in his review that the musical was boring.

Lestat, for the record, was not boring.

Why am I Still Carrying the Torch for Lestat?

It was the first adaptation of the Vampire Chronicles books that didn’t straight-wash the characters, but instead kept their queer relationships as integral to the story. I’d argue that Lestat the musical was better queer representation than the Vampire Chronicles novels. In the VC novels, the vampires’ queerness is tied up in their indulgence in sexual taboos (incest and worse). In the musical, it comes off as something that could save our undead heroes if they would let it. Louis, after all, cites his passivity as the reason for everybody’s downfall. His failure to “embrace” his feelings for Lestat is implied to be part of that passivity. Armand’s evil actions are implied as being a result of his inability to love, yet it’s the suggestion that Marius might not love him that makes him snap at the end of the musical.

Attempts at intellectualizing my sixteen year obsession with a musical that only ran for two months aside, I liked it mostly because it had a good energy. I can’t explain why, but it did. I couldn’t get through it without giggling, and I don’t mean that in a ha ha this is terrible way. The show made me giddy, every time.

I day dream a lot about Lestat one day getting a German language production. Vampire musicals (including Tanz der Vampire and Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula) have historically done quite well in Germany. Enough years have passed since Lestat’s Broadway failure that the creative team may have been able to think of ways to rework it. Finding the right lyricist to translate it would be a good first step. Although it will probably never happen, I still have hopes that Lestat will wow audiences one day.

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