Interview: Creator Carey Sharpe on rocking L.A. with her vampire “popera” Blood/Love
Newly arrived in Los Angeles this Halloween season is Blood/Love, a vampire rock “popera” running for six weeks in September and October at the Crimson in Hollywood. The evening begins with vampires roaming the nightclub’s gothic cocktail lounge before the show moves into the theatre to tell the tale of Valerie Bloodlove, an ancient vampire weary of immortality until she meets a musician who has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for stardom. Following the play, an after-party is available in The Atrium. (Halloween fans and vampire lovers may recall that Hollywood and Vamp, which ran at the Bourbon Room in 2021, used a similar template. Coincidentally, Blood/Love is being staged at the same address on Hollywood Boulevard, though on a different floor.)
Blood/Love began life as an immersive Halloween party in 2019 at The Howard in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the hometown theatre of Carey Sharpe, Daniel LeClaire, and Erin Boehme, who went on to develop the show into a stage musical. Sharpe, who stars as Valerie, provided the musical’s book and songs in collaboration with Dru DeCaro; Boehme and Adam “Snake” Kobylarz provided additional songs. Jonathan & Oksana Platero stage the choreography. Daniel LeClaire directs and produces. The cast also features Cam Anthony, Brennin Hunt, and Daniel Franzese.
According to composer-producer-actress Sharpe, Blood/Love depicts how “the conundrums of life are enlarged by having to negotiate a life going on forever,” adding that even a “pact with the devil takes on a new dimension…”
To learn more about what went into the creation of Blood/Love, we sat down for a Zoom interview with Sharpe, in which we discussed such subjects as transforming a Halloween party into a musical, immersing audiences in a stage show, casting oneself in the lead role, and grading vampires on a scale ranging from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice to Stephanie Meyer.
Blood/Love Interview: Carey Sharpe
The transcript below has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Let’s begin by telling people what to expect from Blood/Love. Promotional materials describe it as an “immersive vampire experience” and a “rock popera.” When I think of an opera, rock or otherwise, I imagine sitting in a seat watching a show, which doesn’t sound like an immersive experience.
CAREY SHARPE: The whole evening is immersive. It’s almost in three parts. When you show up to the venue, you’re going to be ushered into the first space, which is our cocktail lounge in the Crimson. It really is kind of the vampire underground bar. Then when you move into the theater, you’re in that iteration of the Crimson. There is a bar that we don’t use to serve patrons; we use it in the show for characters. We move around the entire theater. It’s not interactive at all – we’re not pulling people out of the audience; we’re not really talking directly to any of the audience members – but it it’s kind of like you’re in the bar with us. A lot of the scenes are set in the Crimson, so it’s almost like you’re just another patron at the bar, and the show is kind of all happening around you in this setting. Then after the show is over, we have a really cool Atrium space where we have a full DJ Afterparty on Friday and Saturday nights. So it is like a several-hour experience instead of just showing up to the theater, watching your show, and leaving.
It’s almost like you’re just another patron at the bar, and the show is all happening around you.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: This is going on September-October, so it’s somewhat tied into the Halloween season, but my impression is that Blood/Love is more of a dramatic musical, not necessarily a horror show.
CAREY SHARPE: There’s some intense moments, but I wouldn’t say we’re trying to scare anybody. Our opening number is really dynamic. We have a whole cast of professional dancers that are incredible, and they bring that drama. It’s very…scary is not quite the right word, but it’s going to feel very cinematic and perfect for Halloween, of course, but also year-round. It could play any time because vampires are eternal; they’re really anytime. But of course it works particularly well at Halloween, and that’s why we always do it in October.
Scary is not quite the right word, but it’s going to feel very cinematic and perfect for Halloween.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Okay, let’s address the vampire element. Where does Blood/Love fall on the spectrum ranging from Victorian vampires like Stoker’s Dracula on one side, Anne Rice’s post-modern vampires in the middle, and Stephanie Meyer’s defanged Twilight characters on the other side?
CAREY SHARPE: I would say they fall between Twilight and the middle point. I don’t think we’re quite as nonchalant as Twilight, but it’s not Victorian at all. It’s set in modern time. We created our own vampire origin story. My character, Valerie Bloodlove, is the original vampire. These particular vampires are very old, so they are not modern looking like the Twilight characters, but they do have cool costumes.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: My understanding is that Valerie Bloodlove is a little burnt out at the beginning of the show but maybe finds a new reason to go on.
CAREY SHARPE: Exactly. She’s just sort of over it, you know. She kind of fell into this. Her backstory is that she was the queen of the underworlds; she was the Bride of Satan basically. I always joke that she’s like The Little Mermaid: she wanted to go up to live amongst the people. The devil was very heartbroken, but he loved her so he agreed to send her to Earth, but she was cursed with the fact that she had to live in the shadows and basically feed off the humans she wanted to be amongst. That’s how she became the first vampire. That was her curse: to be on Earth but never really fully be human. She’s done that for many years and is having a bit of an existential crisis when she meets somebody who made his own deal with the devil, and she sees an opportunity to maybe fulfill her destiny by saving him from his curse by sort of taking it back on herself and going back to where she ultimately belongs.
I always joke that Valerie Bloodlove is like The Little Mermaid: she wanted to go up to live amongst the people.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: How did you conceive Blood/Love? What was the inspiration?
CAREY SHARPE: I own a theater in Wisconsin, and we were looking to do a really immersive, themed vampire Halloween party. Basically, we wanted it to be kind of high-end, and it was like a party. The attire was black-tie, so everybody came very decked out for the evening as vampires. We had all original music and a fashion show. There was kind of like a plotline; it wasn’t a murder mystery, but there was a flow to the party, and it was really well received. That was back in 2019, so I decided I wanted to build it out into more of an actual show than just a party. That’s where it all started.
I had a different team that I was working with originally, but I started building my team for what now is Blood/Love in 2020. A lot of people were of course not doing a whole lot because of the pandemic so I started finding some people that were looking for projects. We were in the early stage, which was a great place to be when we were all shut down and didn’t have much to do other than write and create, so that’s what we did. We did the first workshop version in October of 2021.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: I wanted to ask about the workshop process, because I come from a film background, and when you see a film project that’s in development for five years, you think, “They are having trouble with that.” In theater, that’s different.
CAREY SHARPE: Right, this is really standard for musical theater. I’ve read that the average musical theater show takes about 10 years from inception to, theoretically, Broadway, so it’s a long period of time for development. Unlike film, where you can sit down and edit and make changes, you have to do theatre live, so every time you want to see how it is coming together, you have to actually put together a live production, and that takes time. We’ve been doing one a year since 2021. It wasn’t the full show; it was about half, just kind of testing the waters and seeing if this concept actually worked. It was well received. Of course we made some changes; we’ve cut a few of the original songs or made changes to some and then we’ve written additional songs. Now it has 25 original music numbers, and it really is primarily music. There’s very little dialogue. That’s why we call it a “popera” – it is really a rock opera. The music is really excellent. It’s all very cohesive. We all have a hard time picking our favorite song because there are so many good songs in the show. It’s not like traditional theater music, but we’re still able to tell a story with these pop and rock songs.
There’s very little dialogue. That’s why we call it a “popera” – it is really a rock opera. It’s not like traditional theater music, but we’re still able to tell a story with these pop and rock songs.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Tell me tell me about working with collaborators. There’s so much that goes into a show like this: staging, costumes, then music and lyrics. You’re not telling the story with spoken dialogue; it’s got to be uh quite a lot of work.
CAREY SHARPE: It’s a ton of work. There is a little bit of script, and I do most of the script writing, but where most the story is told is in the lyrics. We have two other writers, but Drew and I are the primaries at this point. When we sit down with these storytelling songs, we will agonize over every single word because it’s set to music, and you have to say everything you need to tell the story in some sort of rhyme structure [that fits] a melody, so it makes the storytelling process even that more difficult. Then you want to make sure that people aren’t missing the plot line, because when you sing things it’s a little less clear than when you say things, so we have to reiterate things to make sure it’s really clear. It’s a lot easier to tell a story in 100 Pages than to tell the same story in two pages, and that’s kind of what you’re doing when you’re writing songs.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Also, I want to ask you about the additional music. Again, this is in contrast to film. If you see a movie with additional music in the credit, it’s like, “Oh no, it tested badly, and they thought they could goose it up with some new music.” I’m sure in a stage production, that’s somewhat of a different situation. There are a couple other people credited with additional music, so were they right for a particular song or style of music?
CAREY SHARPE: There’s four of us that have written the music. Aaron and Adam were writing more early on. Now that we’re getting to the fine-tuning stage, Drew and I tend to be the two that go into the studio and do the editing or the newer works. From the outset, it’s been the four of us, and we do still write on occasion.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Regarding the music, are you singing to recorded backing tracks or live music?
CAREY SHARPE: We have a four-piece band there. There are tracks as well for a lot of those synth sounds, but there is live instrumentation over it. Then we have all live vocals.
Valerie to me is like my Lady Gaga: she’s my alter-ego; she’s my persona. I’m not going to do her forever, but for now I enjoy playing the part.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: I have to ask about casting yourself in the lead. Just for a little bit of context, something similar happened earlier this when year the producer-owner at the Nocturne Theatre in Glendale cast himself in the lead of role of Jekyll & Hyde, the old Broadway musical. When I asked him about that, he seemed really amused that people would come into it thinking, “This is going to be a terrible ego trip,” but they would find out he really can sing incredibly well. So I’m wondering if there’s any of that kind of anticipation on your part regarding thwarting audience expectations.
CAREY SHARPE: Obviously, this industry in general is a bit ego-driven. I don’t think you can be a performer at all if you don’t have the confidence. So for me, this really is my artistic expression. I didn’t just put on Jekyll & Hyde. I wrote the show. This is my music. I say Valerie to me is like my Lady Gaga: she’s my alter-ego; she’s my persona. I’m not going to do her forever, but for now I enjoy playing the part, and I am a trained musician. I started playing violin when I was three; I play violin in the show. When people see the show, they will see that I am able to sing and perform. I enjoy doing it, and nobody questions when Linn Manuel does it, you know? He’s doing all these shows, and he’s amazing. There’s not a lot of people doing that in theater, but if you think about it in pop music, a lot of artists write their own music and then perform it. I’ve just taken that and created an actual show out of it instead of just a concert.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Just FYI, the promotional materials for Blood/Love are calling this the first vampire rock opera, but a couple years ago in the Hollywood Bourbon Room (upstairs from where you are doing Blood/Love), they staged Hollywood and Vamp, which also had an immersive element in the bar leading to a rock-n-roll musical in the main stage area. Has anybody mentioned that to you?
CAREY SHARPE: Not that particular show. Of course, there are other shows that are doing immersive things.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Talk about staging Blood/Love at the Crimson. What were the advantages and limitations of the venue?
CAREY SHARPE: It’s an old club that hasn’t been open for a few years, so we get to build it out and make it our own for our two-month time period, but there’s a few things we can’t do. We don’t have room for the runway [we built in my theatre], so we couldn’t have a full fashion show. We took that number out, and then just for time, we took out one or one or two other numbers. But it’s really the same show; it’s just condensed a little bit. For Los Angeles, this iteration should be about 80-minute runtime. Ultimately, it’ll run about 90 minutes.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: That’s about everything, unless you have some final point to make?
LA. is kind of our out-of-town run. We’re testing the waters to see how it’s received, but we are hoping to bring it back to New York eventually.
CAREY SHARPE: It’s really great show; I think people are going to enjoy it. Just full transparency: we just did a workshop in New York at Joe’s Pub, so L.A. is kind of our out-of-town run. We’re testing the waters to see how it’s received, but we are hoping to bring it back to New York eventually. We are still on our path of building the show, and this is just another great step. We’re really excited about it, but we’re still working on bringing it to a bigger audience.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: So then, this is theoretically a step on the path to Broadway?
CAREY SHARPE: We hope!
Blood/Love runs from September 26 to Saturday, November 2. Performances take place Thursday through Saturday until October 19, with additional Wednesday shows from October 23 onward. Start times are 7pm and 9:30pm nightly. Tickets are $59 for general admission; VIP seating is available. The Crimson is located at 6356 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, on the first floor. Get more information at bloodlove.com.
