‘Lestat’ on Broadway: well, it’s certainly sucking

Which isn’t to say that Lestat offers anything like snappy tunes or spry lyrics. From the opening number:

It suits me well, this modern world
The righteous find depraved
For one who's lived three centuries
A stranger to the grave
The years roll by, and rules that I
Was taught to honor and revere
In this new age of telling all
Seem threats exempt of fear
I've read in recent times the claims
That literature has made
The image of my kind is just
A comic book charade
They demonized this thing that I became
The truth is lost, the clichés still remain
And from the dead there springs a tale that must be told
And epic life connected
Through a single thread of gold
And how from death into damnation I was hurled
It's time this vampire shared his story with the world!

Oh, the clichés remain, and in fact, they supply all the headlines you’re gonna see over reviews of the show: It Sucks. Put a Stake in It. And so on. (I especially like the topper, playing on the show’s tagline, to Michael Riedel’s bit in the New York Post a while back about the drubbing the show got during its tryout in San Francisco this past winter: “Die Young. Live Forever. Close Fast.”

Not that I had read any of the gleefully nasty articles about the show before I saw it -- I just knew, with the keen insight of a geek who knows what happens when cool stuff gets all the, you know, cool stuff ironed out of it for mainstream audiences, i.e. the droves of corn-fed tourists who get herded through Time Square theaters with the same kind of ruthless efficiency they get herded through Disney World. So I went in, thanking the gods of friends-of-friends-who-bought-tix-way-before-they-knew-they-wouldn’t-be-able-to-use-them that I did not have to pay the absurd $111.25 admission price, and settled in for what I expected to be a dose of supernatural badness.

But never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined Lestat would be this hilariously awful, so full of its own portentousness and yet so incoherent, so grim and humorless and yet so inane, so full of excruciatingly insipid songs with idiotic lyrics and apparently deliberately uncatchy melodies. So badly performed -- Hugh Panaro as Lestat has not a whit of the irresistible charisma that Lestat should have, but then, that’s nothing new: Lestat has never been successfully transferred from the page.

The show opens in rural France, where young aristocrat Lestat kills a wolf, or something, which makes his dad hate him, or something, and inspires his mother to tell him to run off to Paris. It’s all desperately confusing while at the same time does nothing to make you wish it made more sense... Although it may be completely different now, according to The New York Times:

"Listen, I know the first 20 minutes still doesn't work," [producer Gregg Maday] told a reporter just before the curtain rose at a recent Saturday night preview, tugging playfully on his white goatee. The creative team, including the director Robert Jess Roth (formerly of "Beauty and the Beast"), had spent the day before laboriously reworking those same 20 minutes, radically altering lighting, sound and set; mere hours ago, Mr. Maday had sounded as though everything was on track. "By Monday," he now said, "it'll be totally different. Don't you love this process?"

No, as a theatergoer, I certainly don’t love this process. They’ve got fucking nerve asking for more than 100 bucks a ticket for a work in progress. And it’s not like no one knew it wasn’t working until the last minute. This appeared on the AP wire on February 2:

The Elton John-Bernie Taupin musical inspired by Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" has canceled its first two weeks of preview performances in New York and delayed its Broadway opening until April 25.

Previews at the Palace Theater will now begin March 25, instead of March 11 as originally planned. The initial opening date was April 13.

Choreographer Jonathan Butterell, who worked on such shows as "The Light in the Piazza" and the recent revival of "Fiddler on the Roof," has been brought in as a creative consultant "to provide an objective overview as it undergoes revisions," the producers, Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, said Thursday in a statement.

The musical received scorching reviews during its San Francisco tryout, which ended Jan. 29. The San Francisco Chronicle called the show "didactic, disjointed, oddly miscast, confusingly designed and floundering in an almost unrelentingly saccharine score by Elton John." The San Jose Mercury News sniffed, "the vampire musical showed few signs of life."

Creative consultant, my ass. I coulda told them what was wrong with the show, if only they’d asked. Huge damn problem number one: When you take the subtext of a story -- in this case, the homoeroticism of Rice’s vampires -- and make it the, you know, text, everything that was intriguing and sly is now blatant, on-the-nose, and so obvious that it’s laughable. There’s a bit, after Lestat has run off to Paris, when he’s rolling around on the bed of his old pal Nicolas

to which the only reponse is snickering at how the show is trying to have it both ways, trying NOT to be about gay vampires so as not to upset the tourists from Iowa while it’s about NOTHING BUT gay vampires. Or at least it must be about gay vampires because it isn’t about anything else. (During the bliss of intermission, my friend and I, after we got over our case of the mad giggles, started casting around for names of actors who might actually be able to pull off a credible adaptation of Rice. Knocking names off the top of my head, I suggested Heath Ledger as Lestat, and, oh, maybe Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis... at which I point I suddenly realized I was already watching Brokeback Vampire... or maybe The Vampire Ennis. Boris Kachka in New York magazine agrees with me, calling the show the “Brokeback of vampire musicals.”)

More tips: Avoid cheap-o sets in $12 million productions. The giant bare flats here look like something out of a high school production, and the bizarre little films (by comic artist and MirrorMask director Dave McKean) flickering on them when someone’s neck gets bitten don’t make up for this ridiculous excuse for a set. The films, the show’s official Web site informs us, are meant to:

symbolize the ecstatic loss-of-consciousness..or "swoon"-- that both the vampire and victim experience during the vampiric embrace. One of these swoons will be projected each time a mortal's life is taken.

But they utterly fail to achieve swoonishness, which is not, I suspect, McKean’s fault -- it’s the fault of the show overall to achieve swoonishness. Lestat should make us swoon -- instead he makes us titter.

Oh, and crucifixion metaphors? Sooooo 11th-grade drama club.

And one last thing. As John Seabrook The New Yorker points out:

The most memorable song in “Lestat” is called “I Want More,” and it is sung by seventeen-year-old Allison Fischer, to the two lead vampires, whom she blames for making her one of them:

Did I rock the family boat
By dining on the help?
Aren’t I just the little beast?
Well, I can’t stop myself.

Seabrook is right: this is by far the best song -- it’s basically Claudia, the child vampire who is spoiled rotten by Lestat and his lover partner in vampiric crime Louis, going all Veruca Salt and demanding an Oompa Loompa NOW. It’s funny and clever and hummable... and it’s as if it arrived from an alternate universe in which this version of Lestat is a parody, a wicked sendup of all things Gothy and trendily morbid and insufferably tedious. But this Lestat is merely Gothy and trendily morbid and insufferably tedious itself.