Has Elton John’s midas touch with musicals deserted him? After the runaway worldwide success of the film-to-stage version of The Lion King (for which he provided the songs for the original film that were then retained for the stage, augmented with new material from African musician Lebo M), a more modest Broadway success with subsequent Disney project in Aida (still unseen in London) and now the London smash Billy Elliot, he was lining up for another Broadway original working for the first time in the theatre with his long-time pop collaborator Bernie Taupin, Lestat, that has booked Broadway’s Palace Theatre for an April opening.
But whether it will get there now has been called into serious question by the reception the show has received at its San Francisco premiere on January 8. The San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Roger Hurwitt wrote, “Didactic, disjointed, oddly miscast, confusingly designed and floundering in an almost unrelentingly saccharine score by Elton John, Lestat opened Sunday as the latest ill-conceived Broadway hopeful” to play in the city, after Mambo Kings (that never got to New York) and Lennon (that did, briefly, after San Francisco). He went on to comment that the songs “range from mildly interesting to, for the most part, banal and virtually undistinguishable. Taupin’s lyrics are often woodenly prosaic and rarely advance the story or our understanding of the characters…. John seems to spend most of the evening trying to become Andrew Lloyd Webber at his most vapid and pretentious.”
Another local review, the Mercury News said “the vampire musical showed few signs of life” and “lacks teeth”, before concluding, “Unless its creators can find a way to infuse more intensity, Lestat may be dead on arrival on Broadway in the spring.” The Contra CostaTimes, meanwhile, declared, “When dealing with vampires, it’s usually best to keep your neck covered and your garlic handy. Lestat proves the exception to the rule. The greatest danger…. is death by boredom.”
Of course, out-of-town try-outs are precisely the sort of place to hear such comments, and re-tool the show, if necessary, for Broadway. Elton John’s own Aida was completely overhauled after a critical mauling in Atlanta, with its then-creative team – including Lestat’s current director Robert Jess Roth, entirely replaced for Broadway.
But Broadway may be particularly nervous of vampire-themed shows after the fast failures there of Dance of the Vampires (that took Michael Crawford back to Broadway for the first time since The Phantom of the Opera but quickly expired; as Broadway columnist Michael Riedel called it yesterday in his New York Post column, it was “a campy fiasco that cost its investors $12 million and Michael Crawford his Broadway career”) and Dracula (“a $10 million bore that drove the final nail in composer Frank Wildhorn’s Broadway coffin”, according to Riedel).
And whether Elton John is (a) available for the kind of re-writes that might be necessary, and (b) would want to run the risk of a Broadway failure at this stage of his new theatre career that has made him one of the most successful of all contemporary writers of musicals is another question. Watch this space.
