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| Independent Online March 26, 2006 |
March 26 , 2006 @ 1:17pm |
Brits over Broadway
By David Usborne in New York
Lestat, meanwhile, has had a trial run with a world premiere in San Francisco last December. Sir Elton, who also wrote songs for the musical of Billy Elliot in the West End, conceded that he has been updating the music since the close of the California run. By the Saturday preview on Broadway, he had added two new songs and excised others.
"Like with Billy Elliot, I wrote an extra song quite late in the day, and we left some songs out," he told Playbill News. "And that's par for the course when you're a composer for a musical. You have to leave your ego at the door and see some songs you really like bite the dust and you have to write some other ones, because the story changes." Sir Elton also hinted that he took on more than he expected with Lestat, the story of a young man turned vampire struggling between his quest for love and his instinct to drink human blood.
The process was "particularly draining, because the songs are much longer, more complex than anything else I've ever written."
But then, he added, writing about a vampire is out of the normal run of things for a composer.
Source: Independent Online
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| The Journal News February 26, 2006 |
March 25 , 2006 @ 12:31pm |
Rice's vampire, Lestat, seeks life on Broadway
By GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
Whether the Vampire Lestat adds Broadway to his long list of popular culture credits — he's the centerpiece of a series of best-selling novels, and Tom Cruise played him in the 1994 movie "Interview With the Vampire — depends, in part, on his ability to ward off a force stronger than garlic or holy water
The critics.
"Lestat" is scheduled to open April 25, after a month of previews , at the Palace Theatre. The Elton John-Bernie Taupin musical is being retooled after a world premiere last month in San Francisco, where reviewers unleashed every possible vampire pun — from "bloody awful" to "toothless" to "anemic" — to express their distaste.
And vampires in general have had a hard time adjusting to the bright lights of Broadway. In 2002, the embarrassingly camp "Dance of the Vampires," drove its star Michael Crawford from New York. Two years later, a lush "Dracula" from North Salem composer Frank Wildhorn barely survived critical scorn for a four-month run.
"Lestat" will have a new ending, a spokesman for the show says. The story drawn from Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" series, featuring 18th-century French aristocrat Lestat de Lioncourt, is being streamlined. Elton John — famous for resisting revisions of his scores — is reworking one song and writing two new ones.
The cast, however, remains intact. Hugh Panaro — like Crawford, he's best know as a "Phantom of the Opera" — stars as Lestat, with Jim Stanek as his long-suffering partner, Louis; Carolee Carmello as Gabrielle, Lestat's fiercely independent mother; Drew Sarich as Armand, Lestat's commanding sometime nemesis; and Allison Fischer as Claudia, Louis and Lestat's daughter, whose betrayal of Lestat gives the story its terrible poignancy.
One fan is already pleased with the results.
"This musical is the fulfillment of my deepest dreams," Anne Rice has said. Rice famously railed against Tom Cruise when he was selected for "Interview," then came to his and the movie's defense once she had seen it, taking out full-page newspaper ads.
Official Rice biographer Katherine Ramsland has suggested that the 1976 novel "Interview With The Vampire" — which tells the story of Louis, Lestat and Claudia, the child Lestat turns into a vampire with tragic results — is really a metaphor for Rice, her husband, the late poet Stan Rice, and their daughter, Michele, who died of leukemia at age 5 in 1972.
"I never consciously thought about it when I was writing the book," Ramsland quotes Rice as saying in "The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's 'The Vampire Chronicles'"(Ballantine Books). "I knew I was using the physical beauty of Michele as the model, but Claudia was a fictional character in her own right. The character, the voice, the things Claudia says have nothing to do with my daughter — but there's no question that this is the symbolic working out of a terrible grief. What else can it possibly be?"
Grief, and its potentially paralyzing effect, is the real subject of Rice's vampire stories. In the 1980s, as Rice developed the characters in her novels, Lestat and his circle came to represent the gay community plagued by AIDS — just as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" had represented the dread of syphilis and the fear of outsiders in turn-of-the-20th-century London.
"Why were these characters born?" Rice asks in her program notes to the musical.
It is, she writes, so that she can say with Lestat: "I will be the hero of this, you understand me? I will never grieve for myself."
Source: Journal News
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| Lestat Musical Blog |
March 25 , 2006 @ 12:29pm |
Lestat and Broadway.com Team Up for Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Blog
In an online first, Broadway.com has teamed up with the upcoming musical Lestat to bring users an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of a mega-musical.
Over the new few months, users can get up close and personal with the cast and creative team of Lestat as we follow them from their current New York rehearsal period through opening night at the Palace Theatre. In addition, leading man Hugh Panaro, who plays the titular character, will share details of his personal process as the star of a big Broadway musical with an ongoing video diary.
Users can access our special Lestat video blog directly at http://lestat.broadway.com.
Based on the celebrated literary character first introduced in Anne Rice's novels The Vampire Lestat, Interview With a Vampire and Queen of the Damned, Lestat features a score by the legendary songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The musical's book is by Linda Woolverton and Robert Jess Roth serves as director. In addition to Panaro, Lestat stars Tony nominee Carolee Carmello, Jim Stanek, Allison Fischer, Michael Genet, Roderick Hill and Drew Sarich.
Lestat premiered at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco from December 17, 2005 through January 29, 2006. It starts performances at the Palace on March 25 and opens on April 25.
Lestat is the first Broadway venture for Warner Bros. Theatrical Ventures.
Source: Broadway.com
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