Word: langella
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Dracula. This beautifully mounted show shivers the funny bones. As the eerie, spectral count, Frank Langella drinks deep of the Pierian spring of fame...
...lust, all right, but in the person of Frank Langella as a demonic force from the nether world, there is also a doomed lyrical romanticism, a nocturne by Chopin, infused into the play. Tall, slender, incomprehensible as magic, garbed in a cape of Stygian splendor, with a face sculptured in alabaster, Langella's Dracula is no flittering bat but the noblest prince of darkness-the fallen Lucifer-as the play makes elliptically clear, whom only the Cross and the stake can bring to his apocalyptic destiny. Langella has always been a spectral, neurasthenic figure onstage with a temperament...
...1920s perfume advertisement, she exudes a musk of sensuality that obviously makes Dracula yearn for more than blood. The rest of the cast is exemplary, and the sounds of baying offstage hounds are ear-tingling. But the show belongs first, last, and almost always to Gorey and Langella...
Even Dracula's menace is reduced to the swishing of his cape. Played by Frank Langella. Dracula is all chin and pointed shoes; the man is so thin he looks like a caricature from Punch. His portrayal is no more full-bodied than he is: mere clenched fists, graceful slinking and fierce screams are not of themselves blood-chilling. It is a mystery that Dracula succeeds in hypnotizing people when no one on stage ever seems to look each other in the eye. They all shuffle and prance. Not one makes a move that goes right for the jugular...
Considering the thudding banalities they are forced to utter, the actors man age a lively display of cocktail-party intelligence. Deborah Kerr is very pukka memsahib, and Barry Nelson displays his boyish charm, though the patina of age has begun to dull it. Frank Langella turns out to be the drollest character onstage with his stubborn macho pride in the size of his tail...