Carolee Carmello and Newcomer Roderick Hill Look to Lestat Leads

Broadway.com has learned that Tony-nominated actress Carolee Carmello and Broadway neophyte Roderick Hill are in talks to appear in the upcoming musical Lestat.

Carmello is currently starring as feisty mom Donna in Mamma Mia!. She received a 1999 Tony Award nomination and Drama Desk Award for her performance in Parade and has also appeared on the Great White Way in 1776, Falsettos, City of Angels, Kiss Me, Kate and Urinetown. Carmello's off-Broadway credits include Elegies: A Song Cycle, A Class Act, John and Jen, Das Barbecü, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, The Vagina Monologue and Hello Again for which she won an Obie Award.

A Juilliard graduate, Hill appeared off-Broadway in Cymbeline. His other theatrical credits include regional mountings of What The Butler Saw, Much Ado About Nothing, Diosa, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, “Master Harold”…and the boys, Twelfth Night, The Singing Forest and the new musical Nerds part of the New York Stage and Film season at Vassar College last summer.

Lestat features music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin and a book by Linda Woolverton. The tuner draws material from three Anne Rice novels Interview With the Vampire, Queen of the Damned and The Vampire Lestat. In the show, Carmello would play Lestat's strong-willed mother Gabrielle de Lioncourt. Hill would appear as Nicolas de Lenfent, who Lestat turns into a vampire early on in the story.

Directed by Robert Jess Roth, the show will premiere in at San Francisco's Curran Theatre in the winter and is expected to hit Broadway in spring 2006. We previously reported Hugh Panaro was in talks to play the title role in the musical and Jim Stanek will be the secondary lead, Louis.