Vlad the Vamp

Ok, I just had to add another blog. Maureen and I just saw Dracula: The Musical. On Broadway. Where people have to *pay* for tickets (luckily, thankfully, not us). But still.

This is what gets a Broadway debut? At least the lovely actors are getting some nice work for a few weeks. I'd be surprised if the critics even attempt to be kind, so these last few blissful days of previews are probably all the joy they have left in the world.

I really don't even now how to describe it. It was camp. It had to be camp. Otherwise, it was the stage version of those really bad, deliberately bad movies we rent purely to make fun of them. Maureen and I kept looking over at each other in our seats, squirming with glee about one or another moment of horridness. It made me yearn for the skillful performance of that thespian Keanu Reeves in Coppola's film version of Dracula, from which this musical seemed to crib costume ideas and even entire scenes.

And the flying. Lordy. Every other scene -- more than every other, really -- featured one vampire or anther winging their way across the stage on wires, floating out of coffins, or hanging upside down like a big ole bat.

Now, I love me some vampires. Used to be obsessed with Anne Rice's novels (before I got exhausted with the idea of keeping up with their publication schedule, or slogging through the florid prose), and you know that I'm one of the world's biggest Buffy fans. I'd even put Bram Stoker's novel Dracula on my list of favorite classics. So at least I could follow the story. But jeez -- there was none of the romance! None of the passion -- all just shouting and singing and the strange homoerotic relationship between Drac and Jonathan, and Van Helsing and Dr. Jack. (Poor Quincey. I mean, at least Arthur had Lucy. For a little while. Though he seemed kinda gay too. But maybe that was just his attempt at acting like an English aristocrat.) I saw none of the fire that should be between Dracula and Mina.

But then again, I keep thinking of her and Allan Quartermain in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and my mind would get the heebie jeebies.

I need to go rewatch the Buffy episode with Dracula, just to cleanse the palate of my mind. Grr. Argh.