The Vampire Lestat review – a mega-fun glam-rock musical … with bloodsucking

Velvet jackets and opera glasses are out, tight trousers and a hoofing glitter stomp are in. Interview With the Vampire’s taken quite the turn It starts with drums, heavily reverbed: da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA-CHA. Cheap, chugging electric guitars kick in. A song plays, and although it’s an original composition it is at least 60% Blockbuster by Sweet. What in the Tony Visconti is happening? This is meant to be season three of Interview with the Vampire! Has it turned into a glam-rock musical? Yes. Yes, it has. The show based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books – a text it is serially unfaithful to while remaining loyal to the source material’s essence, a camp melange of the sinister, sordid and the deeply, sincerely emotional – was previously set in a lush vision of the past, starting in New Orleans in 1910. There romanced the vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), a sensitive pupil and wild, brittle master whose tumultuous relationship was remembered in a second timeline set in 2022 during an interview with Louis conducted by the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). At the close of season two, Molloy published the titular book. Continue reading...