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

You may never have thought you’d live to see the day when the phrase “the $12 million Bernie Taupin/Elton John stage musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved vampire novels” could be uttered in polite company, but that day has arrived. (For those of you counting, this is sign of the apocalypse no. 7,092,164.) Lestat opens on Broadway tonight, and I had the very bad luck to attend a preview performance a few weeks ago.

Like many girl geeks my age, I devoured the Lestat books as a teenager, imagining my life would be immeasurably better should I chance to have my neck sucked by a sexy vampire and become an immortal rock star or something cool like that. But of course, this very cultural provenence is what was guaranteed inevitably to doom such a godforsaken idea as Totally Cool Awesomeness: The Musical! to totally frigid awfulness, with songs. Because some things -- like, say, the existential teenage-style angst of one who does not fit into the world in which he finds himself, and the curse of the person displaced in time -- cannot be reduced to a snappy tune and a spry lyric.

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