If not for Dana Kenn's versatile and mobile sets, Chris DelVecchio's dramatic sound design, and special effects by Greg Meeh, the current off-Broadway version of Dracula would be fatally anemic. As it is, Bram Stoker's Gothic thriller, adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, while offering some technical panache and occasional laughs, is a dusty, old-fashioned melodrama with few drops of lifeblood still oozing out.
Thirty-plus years after Frank Langella's dashing Broadway, and subsequent film, interpretation of the bloodthirsty count of Transylvania, director Paul Alexander fills the Little Shubert Theater stage with smoke, thunder and lightening, strobes, shadowy bats, creepy sounds, and thespian theatricality. Unfortunately, even when displayed with all its grisly expressionism, the tale itself is a sketchy pastiche with zero chemistry between the bloodthirsty count and his latest victim, Lucy.
It's a familiar story. Accompanying an outbreak of mysterious murders, a strange malady of weakness is striking young women. When Lucy (Emily Bridges), becomes a victim of the illness, her father, Dr. Seward (Timothy Jerome) who runs a sanitarium, and her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Jake Silbermann), become worried. They join Professor Abraham van Helsing (George Hearn), a vampire hunter, to search for answers to the suspicious events, and surprise, surprise, all eyes turn to the mysterious Count Dracula who lives in a nearby castle and prowls through the night.
George Hearn and Timothy Jerome play the elder authority figures with confidence, and Silbermann (coming from the daytime serial world) is satisfactory as Lucy's fiancé. Emily Bridges, however, while pale, is not a convincing ailing Lucy, showing only flickers of interest in Dracula. John Buffalo Mailer has the part that must be the most fun to play, Renfield, the Batboy inmate with a Louisiana drawl, who creeps down walls and overacts his crazy heart out. As his Cockney caretaker, Rob O'Hare, is winning with one of the few accents in the play that holds firm throughout. Katharine Luckinbill plays the earnest though unreliable maid with pert piquancy.
Michel Altieri as Dracula, unfortunately, despite flamboyant cape-flinging, hissing and leering glances, evokes neither a menacing vampire nor a lone creature searching for true love. In his American debut, this Italian actor and singer strains for drama and captures caricature, and caricature is what finally stamps directorAlexander's rendition of this old folklore.
While vampires are currently well nourished in the book and film world, they have been anemic on the New York stage - witness Dance of the Vampires, Dracula the Musical, and Lestat. This version of Dracula must join that woeful company. Maybe 500 years is too long a run for any live drama.
