REVIEW: 'Lestat' a Rather Joyless Affair

Musician Rob Thomas and his wife Marisol arrive to the opening night of the new Broadway musical "Lestat", Tueday, April 25, 2006 in New York. (AP Photo/Dima Gavrysh) (Dima Gavrysh - AP)

NEW YORK -- To bite or not to bite? What's a conflicted vampire with severe identity issues to do? That seems to be the question haunting the troubled title character in "Lestat," the morose new musical that opened Tuesday at Broadway's Palace Theatre.

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 Woolverton's book is at least (relatively) clear-headed. Apparently, a lot of work has been done clarifying the plot since the musical tried out in San Francisco last December.

Lestat, played with eager anguish by a game Hugh Panaro, gets turned into a vampire by old Magnus who sees the young man as a worthy heir. One bite, and, boom, Lestat is off and chomping his way through late 18th-century France.

He even turns his mother (the lovely Carolee Carmello) into a vampire. Her health is failing and the promise of living forever is too much to resist. She embraces her new life much more wholeheartedly than her reluctant son.

Lestat finds solace in the arms of childhood friend Nicolas (Roderick Hill). Maybe more than solace. The homoerotic quotient in the musical is pretty high as our hero tries to turn him best buddy into a vampire.

Yet Nicolas, it turns out, is "too pure for the Dark Gift. It destroyed his mind," sniffs Lestat's vampire nemesis, the snarling Armand, played by Drew Sarich. So poor Nicolas is consumed in a burst of flames.

By Act 2, it's a new century and Lestat has found his way to New Orleans where he hooks up with the dissolute Louis (Jim Stanek) and a little girl (Allison Fischer) he meets wandering the streets. Both friend and child soon join the undead in what has to be Louisiana's most bizarre household: gay parents and the fiercest kid on Broadway since Patty McCormack played the murderous Rhoda Penmark in "The Bad Seed."

Fischer provides the evening's unintentional camp highlight, a petulant ditty called "I Want More," in which she sings about needing blood and not the dolls her proxy same-sex parents present to her as gifts.

Technically, the show is Gothic chic, starting with Derek McLane's dark settings. They are appropriately spooky, using multimedia projections to quickly place the story in a spooky woods, a forbidding chateau and even the New Orleans docks. And whenever a victim gets it in the neck, projections begins to glimmer and glow with psychedelic intensity. The costumes by Susan Hilferty are suitably sumptuous.

Even with an excess of story, director Robert Jess Roth briskly moves things along although Lestat's neurotic musings eventually grow wearisome. Roth and Woolverton worked together on Disney's stage version of "Beauty and the Beast," which at least has a spirited, can-do heroine.

Rice's hero is a model of moralistic dithering throughout his long, never-ending life. At one point, Armand chides Lestat, telling him he is "desperate to be good despite yourself."

And that's perhaps the root of the problem with the show itself. Indecision doesn't make for the most compelling of musical theater.