Lestat Reviews- Page 3

[DG]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:29pm

My mistake - the figure I had heard was for TARZAN, as Margo identified.

This just can't bode well at all.

[thespian geek]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:32pm

Allison, Jim, and Drew were the highlights of the show for me, personally. I liked Hugh and Carolee to an extent, but I wasn't horribly blown away by either of them, to be honest. Eh.

[Thesbijean]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:34pm

I have heard it's net costs are $650,000

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:50pm

That's what I figured. The show has never cracked the $600K mark at the box office, so if break even is $650K to 675K ....... well, I don't want to wish any show ill, but .......

[nomdeplume]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:54pm

Sometimes they get concessions to keep a show going.

[SayitSomehow]

Posted: 4/25/06 at 11:57pm

This on is mixed, I guess more so negative, but it has hope!

-TheatreMania.com-

It's the best damned vampire musical Broadway has seen in years. Granted, that's not saying much for Lestat, considering that Broadway's most recent vampire musicals -- Dance of the Vampires (2002) and Dracula: The Musical (2004) -- were atrocities. But the reports of Lestat's death from West Coast critics and New York preview audiences have been greatly exaggerated. The new musical at the Palace is certainly not a great show, but it's occasionally a good one. Based on the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, it has music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin, and a book by Linda Woolverton.
There are a few intriguing ideas and ingredients, two wonderful lead performances, and plenty of good supporting turns in Lestat. When we first meet the title character (played by Hugh Panaro) in the early 19th century, he has just slaughtered some pesky wolves and enjoyed doing so more than he'd expected. (Foreshadowing!) He returns home to what many sons have experienced: a father who criticizes, a mother who encourages. Mom is played by Carolee Carmello, who seems as stiff as her starched costume, but there's a reason for this: Her character's ill. "You must live the life I never could," she tells Lestat -- so he's off to visit ol' pal Nicholas, who's working at a theater in Paris.

Lestat goes home with Nicholas, who's sexually interested in him. Though Lestat does a bit of flirting, he soon says he needs "some air." During his walk, he's attacked by head vampire Magnus. (See? He should have opted for gay sex!) Now Lestat's a vampire, too. That's predictable, but the story improves when he returns home and his mother says "Make me as you are," feeling that the undead existence of a vampire must be better than actual death. This leads to a different kind of Oedipus complex as Lestat becomes a mother-sucker. Savvy audiences would expect this, because a performer of Carmello's stature surely wouldn't agree to die and disappear in Act I. But surprise: She's barely present at all in Act II. In fact, she has more right to sing "What Happened to My Part?" than Sara Ramirez did.

Mom sees a passer-by, screams with hunger, and pounces on the live bait. Perhaps a healthy laugh here and there was the intention of director Robert Jess Roth and the rest of the creative team -- with or without the input of Elton John, who reportedly doesn't take a hands-on interest in the show he's writing. Whatever the case, humor does crop up in the show; but many theatergoers will laugh in a superior way, assuming the staff was too stupid to notice that certain moments are unintentionally funny.

Lestat spends his time biting necks and making converts. When Nicholas learns what's up, he decides that he wants to be a vampire, too; but while Lestat's mom loves her new form of existence, Nicholas doesn't. (Apparently, the vampire's bite affects everyone differently.) Lestat wants Marius to return and cure Nicholas, but the Vampire of Vampires doesn't, so Lestat euthanizes his old friend. And, wouldn't you know it, that's just when Marius shows up! (Well, vampires do sleep late.)

The story takes a few odd turns. Some of the vampires start a theater troupe (no kidding). In a welcoming speech, the playgoers are told that if they are too unnerved by the show within the show, they are free to leave. Is this warning also meant for those in the Palace? Perhaps, for the Vampire Theatre Company presents what can be best described as a choreopoem with dancers in masks cavorting between brightly colored sheets that span the stage horizontally. (Very artsy!) Woolverton's writing is sometimes pedestrian. For example, when Lestat and mom enter a church, he says, "I wonder if we'll be struck down?" But sometimes her work is arresting. When Mom says that she wants to see the world and Lestat discourages her, her rebuttal is that, as a mother, she always accepted the fact that he'd leave her -- so why, she wonders, can't he give her the same consideration?




Lestat comes to the New World, ostensibly to open an American franchise of vampires, and meets Louis. Anyone given these pages to read would swear he had in hand a scene in which a gay man attempts to seduce a straight one. These two become domestic partners and parents of a girl named Claudia, but they have difficulty dealing with the eternal prepubescent. Poor Lestat! When he came across Claudia, she was a dying consumptive, so he figured he'd "save" her by making her a vampire. This short-term solution becomes a long-term problem.

Is it too late for Elton John and Bernie Taupin to join the BMI-Lehman Engel workshop? They didn't know that, for the moments when the action of their musical shifts to Paris or New Orleans, they needn't have written songs that list the charms of those cities. Taupin may have eclipsed the Bingo folks as the creator of this season's most seriously misrhymed and misaccented lyrics. John's music comes off better, but what's passable in the theater won't get many spins on a CD player. Still, a song in which Lestat proclaims "The thirst! I feel it coming on!" gets whoops from the audience. (Maybe it could be used in a Pepsi commercial?)

If Lestat is a flop, no one has told Panaro and Carmello. They throw themselves -- okay, sink their teeth -- into their roles. When each takes center stage and sings, it's galvanizing. Tony nominations for both, please, and maybe one for Allison Fischer as well. Her Claudia is so good, we don't mind that her character's language and demeanor seem far too modern for 1828. Similarly, the anachronism of her country song is ameliorated by her doing it so well.

Set designer Derek McLane saves the splendor for the second act. Susan Hilferty's costumes are rich and evocative. Kenneth Posner provides a terrific lighting effect where sunlight slowly but surely sneaks across the stage -- and you know what the sun does to vampires. Or do you? Woolverton and Rice give us new information about the life and times of these creatures. Pshaw on crosses and stakes in hearts, and garlic isn't even mentioned.

By the way, after 30 years in the show's action have passed, we return to the Vampire Theatre Company and see that it's still going strong. Lestat won't do as well, but if we must have a vampire musical, this one might as well be it.

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:04am

you know I REALLY REALLY wanna see this show- not because its good, but because I love Anne Rice- and naturally wheelchair seating is sold out til what I imagine will be a month past its closing...

[Crazy4Bway]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:13am

And you guys got to keep in mind that not a lot of people listen to critics...and in a lot of cases the critics can butcher a show to death and back but it will still end up a success (Like Wicked-it was trashed in san francisco now look at it lol).
I personally am dying to see this show and hope to see if if i can go to nyc either the 1st weekend in June or at least the last weekend caus A. It looks great, B. I love Hugh Panaro, and C. I am a big fan of Elton John so no critic can kill the desire to see this show(try as their evil egos and minds might ha!)

[thespian geek]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:18am

I wonder how many people would go see the show if Lestat had opted for the gay sex over the fresh air?

Excuse me, I have an appointment in hell tomorrow. See you later.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:24am

The Washington Post is Negative:

""Lestat," which opened last night at the Palace Theatre, is based on part of Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles." Rice's work was also the subject of the slinky movie "Interview With the Vampire," which cast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as androgynous magazine-cover ghouls. "Lestat" features less glamorous actors singing hymns to their inner undeadness and engaging in ungodly amounts of neck-biting -- sessions that, yawn, leave marks but no real impression.

What this latest vampire musical shares with its fellow vampire musicals is a big price tag -- "Lestat's" spreadsheet involves a reported 12 million smackers -- and the goal of a "Phantom"-caliber mystique. The only thing distinguishing this musical from its late, unlamented predecessors is that the lead vampires play for the, er, other team. In other words, "Lestat's" contribution to art and equality is demonstrating that a gay vampire with a two-octave range can be just as dull as a straight one.
________________________________________________________________

Directed by Robert Jess Roth with the grandiose solemnity usually reserved for state funerals, "Lestat" begins in 19th-century France, travels to antebellum New Orleans and then heads back to Paris. Many portentous scenes unfold, with dialogue (care of Linda Woolverton) to match Taupin's lyrics. "I have given you the dark gift and the power to pass it on," intones the disheveled vampire (Joseph Dellger) who attacks Lestat while he's out on an evening constitutional. "Nothing on earth can end your life now but the sun or a blazing fire!"

Panaro played the Phantom on Broadway for some breathtakingly immense number of performances, thereby joining Michael Crawford -- the original Phantom, as well as the star of "Dance of the Vampires" -- in the select club of actors who've warbled "The Music of the Night" and drunk blood on a Broadway stage. In his fashionable three days' stubble, Panaro makes for a particularly earnest and humorless demon in the dark."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/25/AR2006042502251.html

[rocky2428]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:26am

"This leads to a different kind of Oedipus complex as Lestat becomes a mother-sucker. "

Oh, somebody is VERY proud of himself for that line.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:27am

USA Today gives it Two-and-a-half Stars:

"There's no love like a mother's love, especially if your mom happens to be a vampire. Unless, that is, you have two fathers among the living dead.
Those are just a couple of the twists on family values that threaten to make Lestat (* * ½ out of four), which opened Tuesday at the Palace Theatre, the religious right's worst nightmare. Sadly, though, this new Broadway musical based on Anne Rice's popular accounts of bloodlust is no more provocative than your average exercise in post-Andrew Lloyd Webber bombast.

The show also isn't nearly as bad as you may have expected, given the scathing notices it received during a tryout run in San Francisco in January. That's in large part because of composer Elton John, whose melodies are sharper, surer and less shamelessly derivative than Lloyd Webber's. Lestat marks John's first theater collaboration with his longtime partner in pop, Bernie Taupin, whose lyrics aren't always as winning in their romanticism as the hits that made the duo rock's answer to Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The real syrup here, though, pours from Robert Jess Roth's overstated direction and Linda Woolverton's inadvertently comical book, which culls all the melodrama but none of the complexity from its original source. Woolverton has tightened the libretto considerably since winter's San Francisco earthquake, focusing on Rice's first two novels, 1976's Interview with the Vampire and 1985's The Vampire Lestat.

But as previous Broadway outings have proven, not all fiction lends itself to musical theater."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2006-04-25-lestat_x.htm

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:28am

Ouch. These are painful to read LOL...

I wonder what the critics will have to say about THE WEDDING SINGER on Thursday......

[Roninjoey]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:31am

Thespian geek is my hero.

[SayitSomehow]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:32am

WCBS-TV New York

Negative (But some cool video if you want to take a look)

http://wcbstv.com/entertainment/local_story_115210552.html

(CBS) NEW YORK Despite an impressive pedigree -- based on "The Vampire Chronicles" by Anne Rice, with music by the great songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin -- this new Broadway musical has had a long road to the Palace Theatre. Terrible notices out of town. Substantial rewrites. And I suspect that the only person really thrilled to have it on Broadway will be Julia Roberts. Now the critics have someone else to kick around.

Bombs like "Dance of the Vampires" should've been the tip-off: Musicals about vampires just don't work. In this one, Hugh Panaro stars as Lestat, a handsome young Frenchman who, once bitten, becomes a child of the damned. His thirst for blood and search for love takes him from Paris to New Orleans.

The musical is not as bad as you might have heard. The music isn't memorable but it is perfectly pleasant. And the show is often good campy fun. Then again, it's also often unintentionally funny. Vampires are left to the imagination of Anne Rice's readers. They are seductive and terrifying on the page, but toothless on the stage.

Applause meter: 5

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:33am

I think the WEDDING SINGER's notices will be better than these -- but not great (I'm expecting mostly mixed reviews).

[dancinfan]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:44am

It should be noted that Rob Roth and Matt West are getting slammed in all these reviews, but ever since Jonathan Butterell's contributions began after San Francisco, Roth and West have had relatively little input. I guess Butterell's doctoring only did so much, and at the same time, whatever limits he has as a director/choreographer kept Lestat from being better than it has turned out to be.

[thespian geek]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:50am

I'm someone's hero? That's a first. But thank you.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 12:54am

CBS-TV gives it 5 out of 10:

"Despite an impressive pedigree -- based on "The Vampire Chronicles" by Anne Rice, with music by the great songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin -- this new Broadway musical has had a long road to the Palace Theatre. Terrible notices out of town. Substantial rewrites. And I suspect that the only person really thrilled to have it on Broadway will be Julia Roberts. Now the critics have someone else to kick around.

Bombs like "Dance of the Vampires" should've been the tip-off: Musicals about vampires just don't work. In this one, Hugh Panaro stars as Lestat, a handsome young Frenchman who, once bitten, becomes a child of the damned. His thirst for blood and search for love takes him from Paris to New Orleans.

The musical is not as bad as you might have heard. The music isn't memorable but it is perfectly pleasant. And the show is often good campy fun. Then again, it's also often unintentionally funny. Vampires are left to the imagination of Anne Rice's readers. They are seductive and terrifying on the page, but toothless on the stage.

Applause meter: 5"


http://wcbstv.com/entertainment/local_story_115210552.html

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 1:18am

How long since a show got this kind of reviews?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 1:21am

A few days ago, with Threepenny Opera.

[BSoBW2]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 1:35am

HAHAHA, Margo.

This is a literal bloodbath.

[jimnysf]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 2:02am

NY Post LESTAT Half a star

http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/65062.htm

BLOODY AWFUL
April 26, 2006 -- LESTAT Half a star The Palace Theatre, 1654 Broadway, at West 47th Street; [phone].
ARE vampires half- dead or half-alive? It was a question raised by Elton John's new musical "Lestat," which last night arrived - either half-dead or, perhaps, half-alive - at the Palace Theatre.

The track record of vampire musicals is generally horrifying. But backers still seem willing to, as it were, stake them.

"Lestat," based on the well-known Anne Rice novels, has a book by Linda Woolverton, of "Beauty and the Beast" repute, and lyrics by Bernie Taupin, who has collaborated with Sir Elton on some of his biggest pop hits.

But "Lestat" is not likely to top many charts: It is a musical only the chief accountant of a blood bank could love.

First up, what is it all about? Honestly, I'm not quite sure. And it would be a cliché to adapt that glib quip and say about two hours and 25 minutes.

But let's try. Now, there is this French guy, Lestat, who becomes a vampire after slaughtering a pack of wolves in the woods - don't ask - then goes to Paris, does something rather nasty to his own mother, Gabrielle, who thus also gets to be a vam-

pire. Blood ties, as it were.

Did I tell you the time was - at least I think it was - somewhere in the 18th century? Or perhaps earlier. Vampires, I am told, have very little sense of time. To them, one century is pretty much as good as another.

Having initiated, as it were, Mom - who turns out to be something of a blood sport herself - Lestat initiates other people.

What is very clear by the end - it probably took a few centuries, and certainly feels like it - is that vampires have very difficult and unhappy lives. You really don't want to be one.

Especially if it involved music as loud and boring as poor old Lestat has to plow his way through. It's not a life fit for a dog, let alone a bat.

The simple rhymes of Taupin's lyrics and the discursive book by Woolverton are both well down to the standard of Sir Elton's dirge.

Common honesty, as well as sweet charity, demands both praise and sympathy for the cast. Hugh Panaro is especially gallant as the bloodsucking eponymous hero, lifting his voice above the bluster and seemingly making swashbuckling light of the text.

Carolee Carmello suggests a sprightly mother, Drew Sarich is fine as a senior vampire of a different blood-group from the hero, and Jim Stanek, Roderick Hill, Michael Genet and Allison Fischer - playing the nastiest little girl in need of a transfusion currently on Broadway - do their best to keep afloat a ship resolutely searching for icebergs.

And finding them all too easily . . . if not all too soon.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 2:06am

THE WEDDING SINGER will not and should not get great reviews, but it's certainly worthy of a hell of a lot more praise than this crap.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/26/06 at 2:16am

I think the reviews for Threepenny were way better than these, Margo.