#1
Posted: 1/9/06 at 3:55am
Take your pick of vampire puns. Because they all lead to the same consensus: Lestat sucks.
Anne Rice was present, but nay to Elton John. Overall, the audience and performance energy felt lackluster - not at all what one might expect from opening.
Don't get me wrong. I wanted to like it. I am a sucker for gothic musicals. The darker the better. Brooding protagonists and sweeping romance? Sure. So it was with open mind and eager heart that I attended the opening night of The Vampire Lestat.
Act One opens with an older and wiser Lestat (Hugh Panaro) circa 2006, looking back on his life. As a mortal, he fights off wolves but no one believes him, except his buttoned-down mother Gabrielle (Carolee Carmello). In a rushed song-scene, we learn he is destined for *something more*. That something more turns out to be life in Paris with his buddy Nicolas, galivanting about a theatre. Then in a sudden turn of events, Magnus (who has been watching him since he killed the wolves) turns Lestat into a vampire, and then proceeds to kill himself in a flurry of projected flame. Gabrielle pops up in Paris, dying, and Lestat changes her. They romp about town, run into the vampire Armand, and proceed to teach a lesson in civics and freedom to the vampires there. Along the way, Nicolas gets made into a vampire and goes insane. Oh, and the vampires take over a theatre and decide to perform skits and pantomimes untill the end of time. Projections then tell us Lestat and Gabrielle are searching for head honcho vampire Marius, but don't find him, but Nicolas has died, and in front of an impressive stone head (one of the few dimensional set pieces), Carolee Carmello belts out a fantastic song that lets us know that her character (unlike anyone else we've met so far) is changing through conflict, thus causing drama and intrigue, but sadly we won't see her again untill curtain call. Apparently at the end of the act, Lestat, left alone, buries himself in the earth, only to be rescued by Marius. I only know this because it had to be explained to me. Act Two: Marius instructs Lestat to live a human lifetime, so he does, in the New World, and the events of Interview with a Vampire commence, taking us through Claudia's death, Louis departure, and Lestat being hurled off the roof of the Theatre, only to be recovered by Marius, who leads him to drink from Ashaka, Queen of Vampires, as everyone lives happily ever after in a bizarrely chipper song entitled "From The Dead".
The score sounds like it was written by two completely different sets of people. Act One has some truly melodic moments and gorgeous orchestrations as befitting a dark story of love and torment, while Act Two is rife with Elton John sass-numbers and pop ballads ("Embrace It", "Sail Me Away"). The latter is one of my biggest personal quibbles in the show. Sung by Lestat as he sails back to France, it's a quiet moment set against a tilted perspective of a ship's prow and the backdrop of a projected ocean and an old fashioned map and compass rose. A moment of genuine introspection that would be lovely if we hadn't just seen Lestat be a controlling ass for the past twenty minutes and get doused in fire. But he survives to sing the song, how? Because the projections told us so.
I had high hopes for the visuals, and perhaps from a different vantage point, the projections are better executed. But some of them, particularly the Entr'acte and Lestat's fall from the roof, looked like a motion simulator film. Note to Robert Jess Roth: when you insert a scrim every twenty minutes that says "ten years later" or "six months later", you really stop caring about happens to this person, because clearly, their life events are only important for about ten minutes out of every ten years, then it's time to leap forward again. It also doesn't help that by nature, your characters never age nor change. Sidenote: I swear the "Welcome To The New World" costumes are the "One Short Day" costumes, dyed black and white.
If Drew Sarich was a revelation as Armand, Jack Noseworthy must've been... must've been something atrocious. Carolee Carmello milks the best with her material, but the real find here is Allison Fischer as the ever-young Claudia. Both "I Want More" and "I'll Never Have That Chance", despite being lyrically and musically trite, are well-delivered, and each of her scenes carried a momentum the others lacked. Though that could be that through a combination of talent and gasp, decent writing, we come to care about this character and the dramatic conflict they are facing, especially because she makes us feel there's HIGH STAKES INVOLVED.
Linda Woolverton's book tries too hard to condense these events into a forward-driving musical, but instead we're given Lestat's three hour search for enlightenment, which never quite comes to fruition. Hugh Panaro simply "is"; I found him neither remarkable nor offensively bad, but not someone I would care to spend another evening with. I guess that's the crux of the vampire's life - must everything end in fire or madness? I can't say I have the answer; just living this vampire's life in three hours was enough to drive me to a little of both.
Anne Rice was present, but nay to Elton John. Overall, the audience and performance energy felt lackluster - not at all what one might expect from opening.
Don't get me wrong. I wanted to like it. I am a sucker for gothic musicals. The darker the better. Brooding protagonists and sweeping romance? Sure. So it was with open mind and eager heart that I attended the opening night of The Vampire Lestat.
Act One opens with an older and wiser Lestat (Hugh Panaro) circa 2006, looking back on his life. As a mortal, he fights off wolves but no one believes him, except his buttoned-down mother Gabrielle (Carolee Carmello). In a rushed song-scene, we learn he is destined for *something more*. That something more turns out to be life in Paris with his buddy Nicolas, galivanting about a theatre. Then in a sudden turn of events, Magnus (who has been watching him since he killed the wolves) turns Lestat into a vampire, and then proceeds to kill himself in a flurry of projected flame. Gabrielle pops up in Paris, dying, and Lestat changes her. They romp about town, run into the vampire Armand, and proceed to teach a lesson in civics and freedom to the vampires there. Along the way, Nicolas gets made into a vampire and goes insane. Oh, and the vampires take over a theatre and decide to perform skits and pantomimes untill the end of time. Projections then tell us Lestat and Gabrielle are searching for head honcho vampire Marius, but don't find him, but Nicolas has died, and in front of an impressive stone head (one of the few dimensional set pieces), Carolee Carmello belts out a fantastic song that lets us know that her character (unlike anyone else we've met so far) is changing through conflict, thus causing drama and intrigue, but sadly we won't see her again untill curtain call. Apparently at the end of the act, Lestat, left alone, buries himself in the earth, only to be rescued by Marius. I only know this because it had to be explained to me. Act Two: Marius instructs Lestat to live a human lifetime, so he does, in the New World, and the events of Interview with a Vampire commence, taking us through Claudia's death, Louis departure, and Lestat being hurled off the roof of the Theatre, only to be recovered by Marius, who leads him to drink from Ashaka, Queen of Vampires, as everyone lives happily ever after in a bizarrely chipper song entitled "From The Dead".
The score sounds like it was written by two completely different sets of people. Act One has some truly melodic moments and gorgeous orchestrations as befitting a dark story of love and torment, while Act Two is rife with Elton John sass-numbers and pop ballads ("Embrace It", "Sail Me Away"). The latter is one of my biggest personal quibbles in the show. Sung by Lestat as he sails back to France, it's a quiet moment set against a tilted perspective of a ship's prow and the backdrop of a projected ocean and an old fashioned map and compass rose. A moment of genuine introspection that would be lovely if we hadn't just seen Lestat be a controlling ass for the past twenty minutes and get doused in fire. But he survives to sing the song, how? Because the projections told us so.
I had high hopes for the visuals, and perhaps from a different vantage point, the projections are better executed. But some of them, particularly the Entr'acte and Lestat's fall from the roof, looked like a motion simulator film. Note to Robert Jess Roth: when you insert a scrim every twenty minutes that says "ten years later" or "six months later", you really stop caring about happens to this person, because clearly, their life events are only important for about ten minutes out of every ten years, then it's time to leap forward again. It also doesn't help that by nature, your characters never age nor change. Sidenote: I swear the "Welcome To The New World" costumes are the "One Short Day" costumes, dyed black and white.
If Drew Sarich was a revelation as Armand, Jack Noseworthy must've been... must've been something atrocious. Carolee Carmello milks the best with her material, but the real find here is Allison Fischer as the ever-young Claudia. Both "I Want More" and "I'll Never Have That Chance", despite being lyrically and musically trite, are well-delivered, and each of her scenes carried a momentum the others lacked. Though that could be that through a combination of talent and gasp, decent writing, we come to care about this character and the dramatic conflict they are facing, especially because she makes us feel there's HIGH STAKES INVOLVED.
Linda Woolverton's book tries too hard to condense these events into a forward-driving musical, but instead we're given Lestat's three hour search for enlightenment, which never quite comes to fruition. Hugh Panaro simply "is"; I found him neither remarkable nor offensively bad, but not someone I would care to spend another evening with. I guess that's the crux of the vampire's life - must everything end in fire or madness? I can't say I have the answer; just living this vampire's life in three hours was enough to drive me to a little of both.
