‘The Vampire Lestat’ Knows Ball When It Comes To Stephen Sondheim

Just when we thought we were done saying “The Vampire Lestat isn’t a musical, but” about the new season of Interview with the Vampire the titular Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) goes and drops not one but two references to Stephen Sondheim on the AMC series. One of us, one of us!

In the penultimate episode 6, “Montreal,” Lestat, Louis (Jacob Anderson), and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) sit for a passive aggressive dinner. The vampire journalist asks the brat prince what he plans to do next. His rockstar career is ostensibly over. He faked his death. What does vampire retirement look like?

Lestat describes a very romantic and whimsical fantasy he’s been having lately. He lives in a cottage in the woods surrounded by pumpkins and spends his hours transcribing the music of birdsong. Not to get ahead of myself, as an Into the Woods super fan, but that’s very Cinderella of him. Anyway, this is what he says he’d like to do. Once he gets bored with that, he says, “I get a job plunking out Sondheim and Sakamoto at a hotel lounge.” Turning to Louis, he adds “do you know anyone who knows hotels?”

Fun, flirty, and a heck of a cultural reference to drop at the proverbial eleventh hour of The Vampire Lestat. It’s rivaled only by Louis outing himself as a Degrassi: The Next Generation enjoyer. Forgive me, I’m less familiar with the music of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and choose to focus on the former idol in Lestat’s lounge singer fantasy. Let’s talk about Sondheim, Pulitzer prize-winning musical theatre composer/lyricist/legend, as it pertains to Lestat de Lioncourt.

Will The Vampire Lestat drop a secret Sondheim cover? I wish!

Lestat shares a songwriting philosophy with Sondheim

To be fair, the excellent songs that Daniel Hart wrote and composed for Lestat have an occasionally bombastic style that’s not really anything like Sondheim’s ouvre. However, the way The Vampire Lestat frames songs around moments and characters in Lestat’s life reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

“If you ask me to write a love song,” Sondheim once said, “I don’t know what to write. But if you say, ‘write me a torch song about a girl who’s just been jilted by a guy, and she comes into a bar and she’s in a red dress and she orders a grasshopper,’ that I can write. Because you’ve started to characterize and give me specifics to write about. There’s a drink to write about. There’s a bar to write about. There’s a dress to write about. Who is the guy who jilted her? Why did she choose that dress?”

It’s a good credo or edict to follow as a writer or artist, no matter what you’re making. (Also, not young Danny Molloy’s drink of choice! What a weird coincidence. We have to move on.)

Which Sondheim songs do you think Lestat sings in this scenario?

I may or may not have gone insane and made a whole set list for him on Spotify. Frankly, I could make ten using different songs and different concepts/narratives. There are countless themes that a melodramatic and macabre lover of life and love and violence like the vampire Lestat could connect to in Sondheim’s music. He has musicals about killers He has a musical about fairy tale character. He has musicals about miserable single people with terrible timing and even worse communication skills. It’s all there.

Would Lestat go for the mainstream bangers, like “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music and “Being Alive” from Company? Was he way ahead of the curve, arguing for the artistic merit of Merrily We Roll Along before the 2019 revival made it a palpable hit? Would he deign to include collaborations like Gypsy and West Side Story? I personally think that Sunday in the Park with George is more of a vampire Armand (Assad Zaman) musical, as he is a former artist’s muse. But that’s a discussion for later.

He would certainly enjoy taking wild tonal swings between the comedic and the horrific, the sentimental and the sarcastic. Sweeney Todd followed by A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. So many of Sondheim’s love songs are dark, like “Johanna” from Sweeney Todd, “Every Day A Little Death” from A Little Night Music, “Losing My Mind” from Follies, and “Unworthy Of Your Love” from Assassins. One of my personal angsty favorites is sung between a man and his brother’s ghost, called “Get Out/Go,” from the musical Road Show.

In his book Finishing The Hat, Sondheim says that the only “true” love song he ever wrote was “I Guess This Is Goodbye,” from Into the Woods. It’s sung from a boy to his cow.

Lestat makes a Sondheim deep cut in the episode.

Possibly the best options come from a Sondheim Easter Egg that Lestat drops in “Montreal.” At the end of the episode, just before “the Molloys” (Reid’s words) strike them down, Louis and Lestat sit on a park bench. They discuss Louis‘ dream retirement. He chooses the desert, instead of the forest. The two live in a trailer park together, with birds for one and flower boxes for the other. Louis asks, “what blooms at night?”

“Evening primrose,” Lestat replies. If your Sondy-senses were already tingling from the name-drop earlier in the episode, this likely sent them into overdrive. Evening Primrose is the title of a 1966 musical ABC television movie. Sondheim composed music and wrote lyrics for four songs in the eerie special.

This is a niche pull, even among theatre enthusiasts. The musical stars Sondheim’s own muse, collaborator (and alleged lover) Anthony Perkins. He plays a poet named Charles who breaks into a department store looking for a quiet place to write. Once there, Charles finds a group of people who secretly live in the store and never leave. He meets a young woman named Ella (Charmian Carr) who grew up in the department store. He teaches her about the outside world as they fall in love. There’s an absolutely bonkers ending worth of The Twilight Zone.

It’s a weird one, but, certainly perfect for Lestat. The story is oddly reminiscent of his time as Akasha’s keeper, going crazy underground and bringing the world to a captive women. Spoiler alert for Evening Primrose: the lovers get turned into mannequins when they try to leave. Sound familiar? The quirky but strict department store dwellers, and the hunters who come for them, are very vampire coven-y too.

Furthermore, it’s easy to see how heartbreaking lyrics like this, from the song “I Remember,” would appeal to any misunderstood vampire:

I remember days
Or at least I try
But as years go by
They’re sort of haze
And the bluest ink
Isn’t really sky
And at times I think
I would gladly die
For a day of sky

(featured image: Sophie Giraud/AMC)

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