Did Lestat Make the Critics Swoon?

The big-budget musical extravaganza Lestat opened at Broadway's Palace Theatre on April 18, bringing the characters of Anne Rice to the stage singing the music of Sir Elton John and the lyrics of Bernie Taupin. With a cast that includes Hugh Panaro in the title role, Lestat is one the season's most anticipated new shows. Did the critics find anything to sink their teeth into?

Here's a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com review: "The season's most hilarious musical, it turns out, is not a comedy. It is Lestat, an adaptation of the Anne Rice vampire novels so laughable, and so sumptuously designed, that it makes for a surprisingly good time at the theater. No, musical-theater-train-wreck aficionados, it's not quite another Carrie, or even another Dance of the Vampires. Instead it comes off more like an unholy blend of the Disney musical Beauty and the Beast and the cult TV series Beauty and the Beast. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and bet that, with its earnest embrace of Rice's labyrinthine mythology and its unabashed pop-Goth sensibility, Lestat will win over a small but ardent legion of swooning Riceheads. The rest of us will be more bemused than entranced."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "This portrait of blood suckers in existential crisis gives resounding credence to the legend that vampires are masters of hypnosis. Dare to look upon Lestat and keep your eyelids from growing heavier and heavier and heavier…. Somewhere along the way it was decided that vampires were meant to sing and dance, leading to a series of undignified stage portrayals that should have had the Undead Anti-Defamation League up in arms or wings long ago. Lestat, the maiden Broadway production of Warner Brothers Theater Ventures, is the third vampire musical to open in the last few years, and it seems unlikely to break the solemn curse that has plagued the genre."

Clive Barnes of the New York Post: "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…. 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."

Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News: "Often the plot strains to shock us. Lestat's first great romance is with his mother. Several of his amorous conquests are young men. But because its emotional content is zilch, none of this has any particular force…. One of the show's greatest assets is Hugh Panaro. His singing of 'Right Before My Eyes,' which begins high in his gorgeous tenor voice, is beautiful and dramatic. With his matinee-idol looks, Panaro certainly could have made better material exciting…. The material itself is flat—never truly imaginative, never betraying a sense of irony, which might act as a leavening agent."

David Rooney of Variety: "Ultimately, the studio's nascent theatrical division has done no favors to the lost souls wandering the Palace Theater stage. After Dance of the Vampires and Dracula, it might be time to nail the coffin lid shut on all belting bloodsuckers. The show may be much improved, but it's still sadly beyond rescue. While its fundamental problems are manifold, chief among them is unwieldy, densely plotted source material that resists this kind of presentation; and a profound mismatch of that material with the creative talent involved. In his first theatrical pairing with lyricist Bernie Taupin, Elton John's songs lean mainly toward lush, bloated ballads in the Andrew Lloyd Webber or Frank Wildhorn musical vernacular, occasionally dipping into a pop mode that only dimly recalls the songwriting team's evergreen collaborations of the 1970s. Rarely does the music adequately reflect the dark complexity or propel the busy narrative of goth-lit priestess Anne Rice's pulpy 'The Vampire Chronicles' saga."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Based on 'The Vampire Chronicles' of Anne Rice, this lavish show is a rather joyless affair, glum and sober-sided despite yeoman work by a strong cast that throws itself into the musical with gusto. And getting gusto out of the show's dutiful score—music by Elton John and lyrics by Bernie Taupin—is hard work. John's melodies occasionally tantalize but, for the most part, settle for bombast or indistinct meanderings that quickly evaporate. And Taupin's unsurprising lyrics often are easy to anticipate. But then, the dialogue is a bit simplistic, too. The characters don't converse. They speak in pronouncements, momentous declarations that take on the tone of official statements from Above, or maybe that should be Below."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "The curse continues with Lestat, the adaptation of Anne Rice's adored 'Vampire Chronicles' that opened last night for what seemed like an eternity at the Palace Theatre. Despite those Rice credentials, the homoerotic/Oedipal potential and a score by the still-golden duo of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the show is dim, dumb and dreary. Considering that this is the Broadway debut for Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, the biggest shocker is how cheap it all looks. Decency demands we report that the strong cast including Hugh Panaro and Carolee Carmello sing their collective lungs inside out with phony fervor. And there are three rousing numbers near the beginning of the second act and a stop-the-presses performance by young dynamo Allison Fischer."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "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.'"