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Disclaimer:
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Reviews Dracula Reviewed by Cory Vaughn Entire contents are copyright © 2009 Cory Vaughn. All rights reserved.
DISCLAIMER: The reviewer is employed by Actors Theatre of Louisville. Dracula, back for its fourteenth year at Actors Theatre Louisville, is one of my favorite shows. I first saw it ten years ago, during my senior year of high school, one of my first experiences with the theatre where I would eventually go to work. I have since seen it dozens of times, as have many in the audience who make an annual evening of it, and the LEO readers who recently chose it as the Best Theatre Production of the past season. This week, on the tenth anniversary of that initial field-trip viewing, I marked the occasion by sitting in on a matinee with another group of students, some of whom may be getting their first exposure to Actors Theatre, or to any live theatre, for all I know. It's a fun and exciting first show, and if you’ve never seen Dracula through the fresh eyes of a roomful of screaming, hopped-up middle schoolers, you haven’t heard Shakespeare the way the Bard intended! It was a great new way to experience the show and remind myself why I liked it in the first place. Over the years, Dracula has gotten a reputation as a guilty pleasure; a special-effects extravaganza for adrenaline junkies; and a financier of ATL's more important shows later in the season. I disagree. I've seen it so many times now that I know how most of the special effects work (with two or three exceptions), but it continues to hold my interest. It may not be as inventive or as deep on an intellectual or emotional level as anything you'll see at the Humana Festival, but there is nevertheless a human element to haunt your dreams long after the pyrotechnics die down and the lights come back up. This is thanks in part to ATL veteran William McNulty, who took it upon himself three years ago to perform a long-overdue rewrite. The original play, a very loose adaptation of Bram Stoker's original novel by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, was stilted and rather campy. McNulty, returning to the original source material of Stoker's chilling novel and the true-life Carpathian tyrant who inspired it, has removed much of the tiresome camp and substituted a fair amount of gravitas, without sacrificing the fun. He has also clarified and developed many of the characters, and opened it up nicely from the original stuffy drawing-room melodrama with flashbacks to Dracula's Carpathian home and his stormy arrival in England. There are crumbling castles, desecrated family crypts, creepy Victorian parlors, operating rooms, midnight chases through cemeteries, and an apocalyptic climax in the sewers of Carfax Abbey, all played out on the Bingham Theatre's in-the-round stage amid crumbling stone walls, rusty iron gates, eerily distorted voices, a complicated grid of trap doors, and yes, first-rate special effects. The stage is set for a Classic Battle Between Good and Evil. Evil, of course, is represented by tall, dark Randolph Curtis Rand as Count Dracula. With his impressive frame and his distinctly Eastern features, Rand's Dracula couldn’t be further from the movie clichés. That is, until his sharp and venomous fangs come out, and his entire personality takes on the menacing allure of a demonic rodent-like beast; that's further still! His rich, booming baritone voice, too, aids in the transformation, as Dracula morphs from his taunting aristocratic façade, charming and oozing his way into the society on which he wishes to feed, to the monstrous rasps and howls of his true nature. He is truly the most commanding and authentic of the five actors I have had the pleasure of seeing in the title role over the years. Good, of course, is present in the efforts of scientist Thomas Seward (Jeffrey Withers) and occultist Abram Van Helsing (McNulty) to save their friend Lucy Westphal (Kim Stauffer) from becoming Dracula's next victim, and find out exactly what happened to her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (David Ian Lee), in the two months since his baffling disappearance. And somewhere between good and evil is the most problematic patient at Seward's seaside English sanatorium, a hysterical and possibly demon-possessed lunatic named Robert Renfield (played for the third consecutive year by the brilliant Marc Bovino) who steals every single scene in which he appears and often frightens the little kiddies even more than Dracula! All six of the above-listed actors (plus young Helen Lister, one of two child actresses rotating as the Little Girl) are returning to roles they played last year, in what has been described by many – and I agree – as the finest Dracula cast ever at ATL. It may be the first time in the show's fourteen-year history at ATL that a previous run's Equity cast has been reassembled in its entirety, and it's a real coup. Not only do they bring out the best in each other, but having obviously bonded as an ensemble the first time around, they continue to delve deeper into their characters in this their sophomore year, finding new levels of repressed humanity and pain amid all the flash-bang special effects. Audience favorite Bovino, for example, remains a manic bundle of shell-shocked idiosyncrasies as Renfield (he's even picked up two or three new ones) but this year more than ever I felt Renfield's spiritual and emotional distress as his situation worsened. Withers, too, continues to find new shades of grief and even despair as the character who goes through the saddest and most resonant journey; his Seward is a sympathetic fellow brought to the brink of suicide more than once by the loss of both his fiancée and his faith in science. Lee has utterly transformed Harker from the bloodless milquetoast stiff he was in the old show into a swashbuckling hero driven by two very big emotions – his desire to protect his Lucy, and his boundless contempt for the Count – which color his every move. Stauffer remains as ever a vibrant and strong Victorian heroine and would-be victim; as the surrogate through whose eyes the audience experiences much of the play, she is right on target. And in McNulty's skillful hands, the much-less-showy role of vampire hunter Van Helsing is a dogged and formidable foil to the Demon Count; their confrontation early in Act Two is a battle of wills and powers between heavyweights. Joining the cast is a new Little Girl alternate, Emily Steinbach (I believe it was her I saw, but whoever it was, she's off to a great start in her acting career), and five new Acting Apprentices who more than hold their own with the returning pros. As Seward's loyal but somewhat insecure Irish assistant, Courtney Moors displays the spirit and strength of a young Glenn Close; Robbie Tann offers a voice of exasperated sanity as an oafish orderly; York Walker brings raw and terrifying energy to his role as Dracula's monstrous alternate form and gives the two actresses doubling as his first victim, Natalie Allen and Alexis Bronkovic, quite a workout. In the era of kinder, gentler neo-vampires, with teens and tweens obsessing over the latest Twilight novels and new episodes of True Blood regularly appearing on HBO, it’s almost refreshing to return to a traditional portrayal of the vampire as the consummate barbarian he is. McNulty is unambiguous in his refusal to glorify Count Dracula, and those seeking the titillating romanticism of Twilight are advised to look elsewhere. Finally, I feel it is my responsibility to reiterate the warnings that Actors Theatre gives its patrons. The special effects include gunshots, pyrotechnics, fog, strobe lighting, loud noises, periods of total darkness, and actors making entrances and exits through the aisles of the theatre, which may bring them into rather close contact with you. Oh, yes, and blood. Lots of blood. All of this takes place in a stadium-style, in-the-round theatre, which makes everything appear closer. You will notice that every sign advertising Dracula includes the disclaimer "Not for the faint of heart," and they're not kidding! But then again, if a roomful of screaming, hopped-up middle schoolers can handle it, I'll bet you can, too. NOTE: At most public performances, audience members can have their picture taken with Mr. Bovino and the junior members of the cast in the lobby outside the Bingham Theatre for a charge of $5, and all proceeds will benefit the Actors Theatre Apprentice Company.
Actors Theatre of Louisville Running through Oct. 31, 2009
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