This is Really Wrong
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Muhammed My Friend - Tori Amos w/ Maynard James Keenan
Gas prices are soaring, we are involved in a fruitless and losing battle in Iraq, and George Bush still has three years left in office, but this, this, really pushes my buttons!

I was reading the entertainment section of Yahoo! News when I stumbled across this little tidbit from the Associated Press:

NEW YORK - "Lestat," a musical inspired by novelist Anne Rice's best-selling "Vampire Chronicles," will have its world premiere Dec. 17 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco.



The show is a first for the songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, but John's third Broadway musical, following "The Lion King" and "Aida." Hugh Panaro ("Les Miserables," "Side Show") stars in the title role.

"Lestat" is scheduled to play San Francisco through Jan. 29, 2006, before opening on Broadway in March 2006, according to the show's public relations representative, Wayne Wolfe.

WHAT?! No! You can't make a musical out of an Anne Rice novel! I read Rice's Vampire Chronicles starting about ten years ago, when the film version of Interview with the Vampire was released. My girlfriends and I went to see it, accompanied by our moms, mind you, as none of us were old enough to get into R rated movies at the time. I don't know if we went to see it because it was a horror movie, or because Brad Pitt was in it. (For the record, I now think Brad Pitt is quite the lame ass, and would he just fall off the radar already?) I had never read any of Rice's novels, so I enjoyed the film for what it was and that was that. My mom, a book junkie like myself, had fallen in love with Rice's novels and encouraged me to read them. She gave me a copy of Interview and I hastened to my bedroom to find out what she was making such a fuss about.

I don't think I emerged from my room for the rest of the day.

I was utterly enthralled. Rice had painted a picture with words, a lush, gorgeous picture that had me totally in its clutches. Her prose and style were stunning - she seemed to have come from a time when writers savored every detail. Reading the book was like being transported back in time. The novel was based in New Orleans, and it seemed I could almost feel the steamy, humid bayou air, see the opulent plantation homes, smell the Mississippi river and the salt breezes coming in from the Gulf. I think I read Interview in two days, and immediately went on to The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, and all the rest.

By the way, a few words about the film version of Queen of the Damned.....what a waste of time and money! That's two hours of my life I'll never get back! And for those of us familiar with Rice's vampire novels, will they never get the character Armand right? First they cast him (in Interview) as a raven-haired thirty-something, then, in Queen, as a blonde who looks like a grunge band reject.

That said, I'd really like to see the stage production of Gregory Maguire's Wicked. I hear it's awesome.