Word: draculas
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...sure what she'd have thought of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I'm told features three Victorian heroes who wander around waving crosses at a rate unmatched at least since Christ was a corporal. In the adaptation now at the Loeb, Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston wisely cut out two heroes and a surplus Victorian heroine but they left all the crosses in. Their hearts, at least, were in the right place...
...heart of this Dracula, oddly enough, is not the hero of Romania's early struggles for independence who gives it its title, but Catherine Dean, the Victorian heroine. Her willingness to act to the hilt--even in delivering lines on the order of "What were you doing over there with papa and the hammer and that horrible wooden stake?"--is astonishing. It's a willingness understandably not shared by most of the rest of the company--they have lots of lines like "I broke in when I heard the dogs howling" and "How is your daughter and her 'nervous prostration...
Lindsay Davis, this Dracula's director, provides a background soundtrack, but his inability to think of more than two or three ways for a vampire to sidle up menacingly behind his victim's back means that the sidlings quickly become repetitious. Less excusable is the distressing obviousness with which Renfield eavesdrops on everyone's conversations: the Victorians may have been dumb, but surely they weren't deaf and blind...
Davis and costume designer Jan Stauffer team up, however, for this production's most striking effect, the tableau of Dracula embracing the Victorian heroine, while the folds of his black robes overlap the folds of her white ones, with which the first act ends. It makes the heroine's appearance in a long black robe for the second act as effective as it is inevitable. Stuart Sundlun's set and Bill Scherlis's lighting, by way of contrast, lack the menacing shadows demanded by the play, whose everyday aspects are quite apparent enough...
...DRACULA, adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. An amended version of a 1920's play based on the pioneering study of sexual practices in Transylvania, this production "attempts to capture the original Victorian setting of the Bram Stoker nove. A thriller!" Opens tonight at 8, at the Loeb. Also tomorrow and Saturday at 12 midnight, and this Sunday and next Wednesday through Saturday...