Word: balderston
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This Dracula had its roots in the 1977 Broadway production of a 1927 play by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, a corny, embarrassing old drawing-room comedy-melodrama with one or two amusing confrontations, sort of a "Vampire Who Came To Dinner." Director Dennis Rosa couldn't decide whether he wanted a campy parody of 30's horror movies or a straight chiller (which would have been impossible with that script). So he tried to do it both ways and it came out neither--a mess, complicated by the celebrated Edward Gorey's black-and-white cartoon sets, which reduced...
This is not the half-century-old dramatization by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, in which Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel was moved up to the 1920s--the version that brought fame to Bela Lugosi (whom I saw play it here in Boston near the end of his life) and is now doing the same on Broadway for Frank Langella. Nor is it the later adaptation by Crane Johnson, which I have never seen...
Dramatized by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker's novel...
...Wilbur Theater, Edward Gorey '50, a writer/illustrator noted for his macabre wit, and Dennis Rosa, an Obie award winning director, have resurrected "Dracula," a 1927 play by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston. It is no occasion for hallelujahs, though. Dracula should be great on stage, with immediate, uncelluloid flesh and blood primed for the mauling. But the evening at the Wilbur is anemic...
...trouble is that everyone does know the story, or at least some version of it. The Deane-Balderston play is hopelessly dated; it does not rattle anyone's teeth, and the only resonances suggest old Clairol commercials. ("Now I am full of vitality. Before I was such a poor drab thing..." says one blonde character to another.) The production is paced like an old movie running on a rusty projector. There is no tension, no energy. Characters constantly strike poses straight out of silent pictures--but with none of the old film actors' sincerity...