The splashy, big-budget, supposedly Broadway-bound musical version of Anne Rice’s bestselling vampire novels has run squarely into a wall of critical derision in its tryout run in San Francisco. “The creative team has nearly driven a wooden stake through the heart of author Anne Rice’s much-loved Vampire Chronicles,” says one Bay Area daily, and that’s one of the kinder reviews. San Francisco’s largest daily summed up the brickbats nicely: “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.”