I just finished watching a bootleg of Lestat: the Musical and I’ll try my best to gather my thoughts here:
(rambly little first impression, read at your own risk)
A little information about my biases: I love musicals to death and I have only watched the movie (Interview with the Vampire) and read the first book of the Vampire Chronicles series (of the same name).
At first I was thinking that I was completely in love with this, I see the stage, poorly filmed as it was I am used to that as an avid Bootleg consumer, I hear the actor playing Lestat and he sings this power hymn and I utterly love it.
You must know, I am a sucker for power hyms and musical actors and actresses belting for their lives. I love that and I was immediately planning to terrorize my dog with private concerts just for him, of my singing Lestat the Musical up and down non-stop for the next few months.
I am thinking this has a nice tune to it, it’s closer to “classical” stuff like Les Miserables than it is to modern stuff like Dear Evan Hanson, just for example, and I really adore these older style musicals, (I do like the music from DEH, just not quite as much lol) I was hoping it might be mostly sung through then at the very start, but that wasn’t the case. That is not so bad, just a littl preference though.
As I continue watching and listening attentively I notice problems. For one, I feel like all of the songs were power anthems? Is that just me, or were they really (except for one or two) power anthems? That feel dominated the show in any case, and there was a lack of variety in tone.
Of course this is just my first impression, I often grow to change my opinion on musicals after listening to their tracks on their own a couple of times. Like with Sweeney Todd for example. So we will see about this all...
Another issue, which I knew would be completely innevitable and I went into seeing the show prepared for that, was the horrible pacing.
Things were just happening, constantly event after event after event, sometimes a song would slow things down then really suddenly and it would seem a little out of place somehow, which I have never felt in a musical personally.
Like I said I have only read the first book so far, naturally I was confused as all hell during parts of the show and I was wondering how things would have played out in the book, like the things the show was portraying, I was doubting how closely they resembled what “actually” happened, especially once we got into territory that I could compare again, it made me retroactively wonder how different those scenes might have been.
I think the only way that you could make the pacing of all that content work would be if you made the whole thing to be one of those epic operas that span like six or eight hours. I would love that to be honest, they would have time to make the whole thing more like how reading Anne Rice feels. I would go see that certainly, but I know that I might be fairly alone in that, so obviously that would not do that. I wouldn’t expect them to do it.
Things that are not major issues (or not issues at all):
-The actor who I saw play Lestat did a really great job, I love the voice that he had. I think that his songs were written in a way that makes the character shine. I loved the really high tenor parts, because that is honestly what I imagined for Lestat.
-Claudia’s performance was great, and I understand totally that they couldn’t have an actual little child play her and I also really enjoyed her songs and you can without hesitance bet good money that I will be singing the two songs she had around the house next week, often, at full volume, but I do have a gripe with her. I think she should have been a higher soprano, like a really high soprano something akin to Johanna in Sweeney Todd or Cosette in Les Mis. I think that would have suited her child-like-ness better. Though I understand that having her sing a bit deeper over all could add to portraying her inner maturity and make for a great disconnect between her appearance and her true identity, I personally felt as though the text did enough of that and her “silver bell like voice”, as Anne Rice wrote about one million times in the first book, was not quite represented.
Something that could have also added to her child like appearance would be singing her notes flat. I love love love vibrato, and I know it’s healthier for the voice, but most children do not possess a vibrato in their voice yet and I think it would have given the character more to differentiate herself from the rest on an auditorial level. (Let me be blunt, I am not a pro at music, or music theory, just a humble musical fan, it may very well be that my request here is totally impossible. I do not know.)
-Armands character throughout the musical was... interesting. Very very different from what I have come to know from the first book. Perhaps Louis is just very deluded in his view of Armand, even though there are definitely some serious character flaws depicted in the first book, or perhaps he is just made to be a bit of a different character in this iteration, I will have to read more to find answers to that question. Though I am fairly sure my reading will reveal Armand to be a much more complex character than depicted in the musical. (Obviously, since it is so very abridged)
Anyway, this is all I have to say for my very first impressions, right at three in the morning after watching it. I cannot say if I truly like it or not yet, I will listen to the songs individually, while walking my dog most likely and I am certain I will fall in love with at least a few of them.
Maybe I’ll write and update on this, or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll watch the other bootleg from the san francisco production that I found tomorrow while painting. We will see.
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