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NEW YORK -- There's no love like a mother's love, especially if your mom happens to be a vampire. Unless, that is, you have two fathers among the living dead.
Those are just a couple of the twists on family values that threaten to make Lestat (** 1/2 out of four), which opened Tuesday at the Palace Theatre, the religious right's worst nightmare. Sadly, though, this new Broadway musical based on Anne Rice's popular accounts of bloodlust is no more provocative than your average exercise in post-Andrew Lloyd Webber bombast.
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.
But as previous Broadway outings have proven, not all fiction lends itself to musical theater. It couldn't have been a piece of cake crafting a libretto around the story of a bloodsucking hunk who seduces or is seduced into sharing his powers with his mom, a pre-adolescent girl and a succession of similarly yummy young men and women. And sure enough, Woolverton's alternately pretentious and goofy script, accompanied by a series of pretentious and goofy special effects, saps the material of any real erotic tension or menace.
The actors all look good and sing, well, loudly. In the title role, Hugh Panaro looks as if he just stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad and croons with all the nuance of an American Idol contestant, but he still manages to project a certain tortured tenderness. As his underage victim, Claudia, Allison Fischer belts out her tunes with a bratty exuberance that brings to mind June in Gypsy more than Dracula's daughter.
Jim Stanek and Roderick Hill are more sedate as two of the guys Lestat digs, and digs into, the most. But Drew Sarich lends additional Sturm und Drang, und schmaltz, as our hero's perpetually peeved rival.
Carolee Carmello, as Lestat's ailing mother turned partner-in-crime, comes closest to evoking any real creepiness. If this vampires' tale had more of that bite, it might not be so draining.
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