Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Love at First Bite,’ With Dracula’s Big Come-On Uncharacteristically Rebuffed)

(Count Dracula, having been seized by love at first sight for flaky blond supermodel Cindy Sondheim—whom he believes is the current reincarnation of Mina Harker—sits down at her table to make his best case.)

Count Dracula [played by George Hamilton]: “I love you, and can give you eternal life.”

Cindy Sondheim [played by Susan Saint James]: “Shit! I knew it! An insurance salesman. I’ve already got Prudential.”

Dracula [haughtily]: “I am Count Dracula. I don’t sell life insurance!”

Cindy: “Well, don’t get so hostile! You walk over here and start to tell me you love me. How can you possibly love me? You don’t even know me. Maybe the only thing you know is that I don’t want to get married.”— Love at First Bite (1979), screenplay by Robert Kaufman, directed by Stan Dragoti

Dragoti knew about blond supermodels all too well: he was married, in the Seventies, to perhaps the biggest one of the time: Cheryl Tiegs.

Theater Review: Kate Hamill’s ‘Dracula,’ Presented by the Classic Stage Company, NYC

Kate Hamill has carved out an interesting niche among today’s playwrights: adapting classic novels (Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) with a feminist bent. I enjoyed one of these, Vanity Fair, produced for the late, great Pearl Theater Co., while taking issue with her view that Becky Sharp was less the anti-heroic schemer of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian novel than a disadvantaged woman using any means necessary to succeed in a patriarchal society.

Ms. Hamill took even more liberties with source material in her new take on Dracula, which closed two weekends ago at New York City’s Classic Stage Company. Not that that’s unusual: Filmmakers, for instance, have used Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a series of suggestions rather than as sacred writ not to be tampered with. I’m not entirely sure that her central conceit—that the Transylvanian count is, above all, a “toxic predator”—works, even in a current environment in which rogue males are being confronted like the famous bloodsucker in his crypt.

Dracula has been presented in repertory with Frankenstein. I did not see the latter, but the pairing is natural enough: the two, which bookended the 19^th century as landmarks in horror fiction, also launched the careers of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in their classic 1931 Universal Pictures films.

Over the years, Stoker’s novel has been interpreted in several ways: religious (the count, a kind of anti-Christ, retreats from the crucifix), political (Dracula comes from authoritarian Eastern Europe, while his pursuers represent the transatlantic democracies), and Freudian (he overpowers—i.e., seduces—men and women without regard to marriage vows, in a direct challenge to Victorian morals). (It’s possible, especially within the last week or so, dominated by news of the coronavirus, to see Dracula in another light: as a source of contagion and fear.)

Ms. Hamill’s might be the first interpretation I have encountered that looks at Dracula from a feminist point of view. It requires serious gender-bending to accomplish this. Notably, the playwright herself has turned Renfield, the middle-aged male lunatic asylum patient who eats flies and spiders for their blood, into Mrs. Renfield, a poet whose trust in the protective men in her life (father and husband) has come to naught now that she is under the spell of Dracula.

Mina Harker—traditionally one of the count’s intended victims—is transformed, in Ms. Hamill’s telling, into a pregnant avenger of her (un)dead friend Lucy and of her husband Jonathan, who stumbles home stark-raving mad after a visit to the Count’s Transylvania lair. As if Mina as a counterpart to Sigourney Weaver’s intrepid Alien monster slayer weren’t enough, she makes common cause with vampire hunter Van Helsing, an African-American female who swaggers onstage wearing a cowboy hat. (“You were expecting an old Dutchman?” she asks.)

In other words, literary purists and traditionalists are best advised to look elsewhere.

But this “bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” as it is called on the title page of the script, had its own compensations, and Van Helsing’s wisecrack points to one of them: a refusal to take convention (literary or masculine) too seriously. Hamill gives herself one of the most gruesomely funny lines when Renfield requests a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten”—for purposes of consumption rather than companionship. And Mina becomes rightly suspicious when she keeps getting only short notes from her long-absent husband, invariably reassuring her that his Transylvanian host is “charming.”

All of this, however, serves a deadly purpose: satirizing a patriarchy as dangerous to the female soul as to its body. Lucy, for instance, offers little evidence of love in her explanation to Mina on why she is agreeing to marry the stuffy head of the lunatic asylum where Renfield is kept, Dr. George Seward:

“I have no family, and while I am comfortable enough—without a husband, I have no future, no prospects; I cannot even dictate how my money is spent, it’s all held in trust. But our whole destinies are wrapped up in the men we marry; once we are wed we are—little better than their chattel, according to the law, and I just—wish I could be absolutely sure of his character.”

Hamill’s skill with dialogue is demonstrated with that neat segue from large social context to Seward’s “character.” In short order, he will prove Lucy correct in her uneasiness, as his arrogance exposes her to Dracula. His post-mortem lament that she was “an angel” provokes a memorable retort from Mina that her friend was “vulgar—and funny—and clever—and complicated—she was not some porcelain idol for you to worship!”

As an Off-Broadway troupe, Classic Stage doesn’t have the same resources as larger houses, but the group’s artistic director, John Doyle—doubling here as scenic designer—used what it had to simple but telling effect. (All characters are dressed in white except for the outsider, Van Helsing.) Director Sarna Lapine drew out the talents of her cast, especially Matthew Saldivar as priggish Seward, Kelley Curran as indomitable Mina, and Jessica Frances Dukes as the irreverent Van Helsing.

Having seen a couple of past Classic Stage productions (including David Ives' Moliere adaptation The School for Lies, which I reviewed favorably here), and this original take on Dracula had me looking forward to the company’s next production, Stephen Sondheim’s controversial Assassins.  

But the coronavirus crisis has put rehearsals on that on hold for now. One can only hope, as a message on the company’s Web site assures patrons, that it will eventually mount the musical “in the coming months.” 

One hates to think of its season—like that of so many others in New York—laid waste by a disease as horrifying, in a far different manner, than the double bill it may have unexpectedly finished its season with.

Tweet of the Day (Kimmy Monte, on Being ‘Down for the Count’)

“I hate when boxing announcers say a boxer is ‘down for the count.’ I don't care that he loves Dracula; I just want to know who's winning.”— @KimmyMonte, tweet of June 9, 2014

This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

This Day in Theater History (Langella’s ‘Dracula’ Puts Bite Into Bway Fans)

October 20, 1977—In every possible way, Dracula should have been dispatched by critics with their usual mindless one-word dismissals of Broadway revivals: “dated.” It had been 80 years since publication of Bram Stoker’s horror novel, and 50 years to the month since John Balderston had adapted Hamilton Deane’s British play for an American audience. Bela Lugosi was dead, and the count from Transylvania had become fodder for comics with his thick accent, pallid pallor and preposterous sleeping habits.

Instead, the production premiering at the Martin Beck Theatre on this night became a roaring success, a straight play that lasted for more than 900 performances—three times the length of the original Deane-Balderston play that made Lugosi a star in the United States. In no small measure, the play’s success owed much to star Frank Langella and scenic and costume designer Edward Gorey.

The photo accompanying this post, in a way, captures the contribution of both men. Langella fills the space below the arch not just with his tall frame but upstretched arms. Not for him the familiar blood-red eyes and fangs, nor even that accent. Instead of a creature of the mists and howls of his overseas castle, he radiates a sexual charisma that makes him more our contemporary than that of the Victorians he threatened. He is “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” to borrow the phrase used by Lady Caroline Lamb about her lover, the poet Lord Byron (who, as it happened, inspired what is considered the prototype of the modern vampire tale: The Vampyre, by his doctor friend John Polidori).

Notice the background of the photo: It’s black and white. Much like photography of this kind, it’s stark, eliminating the distraction of color, forcing attention to shapes and shades. It is beyond time, much like the un-dead Count himself.

Gorey’s black-and-white design has other implications. It suggests that the mere presence of Dracula has drained the world he invades of the normal palette of colors. At the same time, as director Dennis Rosa noted in a short interview with radio hosts Isobel Robins and Richard Seff for their “This Is Broadway” series, it also represented “good against evil, white against black.”

But that’s not all here. Over the archway, anchoring the curtains, is a pair of skulls—the kind of macabre but satiric touch that Rosa and the show’s producers hoped for when hiring Gorey, whose illustrations had appeared in outlets as diverse as children’s books and The New Yorker. Bat motifs appeared increasingly throughout the play, suggesting Dracula’s spreading, insidious influence, and amid each black-and-white tableau is a spot of red—a symbol of blood.

Some critics, including New York Magazine’s John Simon, complained that all of this was camping the play up even before the plot started. I think the Gorey-Rosa approach was exactly right, however. Staging the drama without a wink of only kind would have been ridiculous, practically inviting comments about the hoary nature of the material, with the inevitable jokes about the show being un-dead on arrival.

No, the wink-and-a-nod approach allowed the show’s creators to challenge thinking about the character. Lugosi’s Dracula had only directly addressed the audience once, with a comment about how living in Transylvania had left him with “few opportunities.” In contrast, Langella’s Count was continually looking out of the corner of his eye at the audience, making them complicit in his actions—and mocking the staid British Victorians he was attempting to subvert.

All of this made this Dracula doubly threatening—and, for the fictional women onstage and real-life ones in the audience, all the more exciting. The climax (in more sense than one) of all of this occurred at the end of the second act, just before intermission, when Langella’s “creature of the night” circled Lucy Seward in her (bat-shaped) bed. Lasting several minutes, the scene was all but soundless until the last second, when Lucy’s moan as Dracula goes for the jugular indicated erotic satisfaction more than terror.

The following spring, I saw the play as part of an “Enrichment” day offered by my high school, in which we had the choice of several plays or musicals to attend. I had heard the play was good, but I had no idea of the particular nature of it, nor why so many females were in my class group attending the show.

Hearing the mass squeals of delight from the co-eds, I suddenly understood the intense appeal to this group. Yet they were hardly alone: one female theatergoer on opening night, in a widely reported remark, observed, “I’d rather spend one night with Dracula dead, than the rest of my life with my husband alive.”

Like Lugosi, Langella repeated his star turn onscreen as the bloodthirsty count, albeit with less successful results. The fault, however, lay not with him (nor with his co-star, the luminous Kate Nelligan) but with director John Badham, who, fresh off his success with Saturday Night Fever, jettisoned Gorey's design for a more "realistic" color palette and introduced ill-conceived changes to the original story.

I had seen Langella previously on TV, in PBS’s Theater in America production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, but this experience was my first hint of what a magnetic stage performer he could be. He had already won a Tony Award as a lizard in Edward Albee’s Seascape, and now he would gain a nomination as Stoker’s eternal bat-man. 

Among my cherished memories of Broadway shows in the past couple of decades have been his appearances in appearances in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, and Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy. The septuagenarian might no longer be a matinee idol who can make women of all ages swoon, but he remains as much a mesmerizing stage presence as when I saw him 35 years ago.

This Day in Literary History (‘Dracula’s’ Stoker Meets Future Theater Boss Irving)

December 3, 1876—A relatively young man comes under the influence of an older, all-consuming master who, over many years, slowly drains his life essence away. No, we’re not referring to the hapless clerk Renfield and the lord of the castle where he’s unlucky enough to be an overnight guest, Dracula. Rather, this is the creator of the Romanian count, Bram Stoker, and the British theater giant he would serve for nearly a quarter-century, Sir Henry Irving.

I was immediately taken with the image accompanying this post, a photograph on a paperbound edition of Dracula, even though, technically speaking, it didn’t look like any of the film versions of the famous vampire that I’d seen. The source, revealed on the back cover, established the reason for my fascination, as well as its connection to the subject of this post: It’s Irving, appearing as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. The same hypnotic, commanding stare translated easily to the written page as Dracula—and could also, with more self-centeredness than bottomless evil, make Stoker do Irving’s bidding.

The two men met on this date in Dublin, when Irving--successor to Edmund Kean and predecessor of Laurence Olivier as an actor-manager of a major London theater--was appearing in Hamlet. The 30-year-old Stoker had followed his Protestant Irish father into the civil service, and though he did his best at his job (including writing a manual, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, that even he admitted was "dry as dust"), he needed another outlet for his restless energy. He found it in the Dublin Evening Mail, to which he contributed unpaid theater reviews, including an extremely flattering one of Irving’s Hamlet.

The actor invited the civil servant-theater wannabe to another performance, this time in a hotel room. Stoker encountered a man whose very physical presence was striking, as summarized by Michael Kilgarriff in an article called “The Knight From Nowhere” on the website of The Irving Society:

“Henry Irving was a tall, slender figure—about 6' 2"—with hair worn longer than was customary, a clean-shaven chin—again unusual for the times—a long, strikingly sensitive face and a dominant, rather sardonic, presence which both fascinated and intimidated.”

Once Stoker had followed up on Irving’s invitation to talk about himself, the great man began to recite the poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” a violent, lurid tale of a teacher who beats an old man to death for a bit of gold.

As Stoker recalled three decades later in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Irving’s recitation rendered him “hysterical”:

“So great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was as of stone…The whole thing was new, re-created by a force of passion which was like a new power.”

If it were anyone else describing the impact of this privately acted melodrama, comparisons to a certain famous character might not have been drawn. But this is the creator of Dracula, mind you, and the whole thing not only makes sense but seems inevitable in light of that.

The actor went into the other room for a short bit, emerging with a photograph inscribed, "My dear friend Stoker. God bless you! God bless you!! Henry Irving. Dublin, December 3, 1876."

Dracula has been frequently interpreted in Freudian terms that heavily stress sexual elements barely restrained by Victorian mores. Literature’s great vampire not only overwhelms females, but males, too. (He warns his “brides” in the castle against taking Jonathan Harker, noting “This man belongs to me”--and if that still doesn’t get the point across, “Now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will.”)

Some recent biographers of Stoker and Irving see the following summary by Stoker of his first encounter with his future friend-employer in similar homoerotic terms: “In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.” That closeness contrasts sharply with the distant, chilly relations that both men had with their wives over the next few decades.

Three years after their first encounter, Irving asked Stoker to be business manager and confidential secretary of his Lyceum Theatre. It was a heady but demanding position. Irving was determined on nothing less than elevating acting to a respectable profession in Britain. In this, he succeeded overwhelmingly. There were, of course, other landmark actors before him in the nation (notably David Garrick and Edmund Kean), but Irving was the first in a now-long line of actors knighted for their achievements that have included Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellan, Richard Attenborough, and Anthony Hopkins.

At the center of this great enterprise, Stoker met most of the great names in British society. But the hours were long and the stress enormous. Irving didn’t risk offending contemporary tastes (as George Bernard Shaw complained, his unwillingness to commission new plays left the London theater scene a vast desert), but constantly put his company in peril through his spendthrift ways in making the Lyceum an ornate showplace. Moreover, he disregarded the wishes of his vibrant star, Ellen Terry, to broaden her roles to include comedy.

In 1898, the whole financial structure collapsed, and Irving was forced to sell his interest in the Lyceum— without telling Stoker beforehand. Stoker remained associated with Irving until the actor’s death in October 1905, but the old intimacy and trust had to be gone.

At least some of that might have resulted from tensions over Dracula. Irving had been playing Mephistopheles in Faust in the several years before the novel was published in 1897, and Stoker— who had already turned his hand to short fiction when he had the time— thought that his horror tale had potential as a theatrical vehicle for his boss.

It never came to pass. In May 1897, the long-suffering business manager had another indignity to endure. The novelist was conducting a staged reading of his play, perhaps to secure a copyright, when his boss was asked his opinion of the work. “Dreadful” came the reply, a stage whisper that, legend held, was loud enough to be heard throughout the theater.

Stoker was correct that his work could be translated beyond print; he simply was wrong to imagine that it belonged on the stage. Even the Hamilton Deane-John Balderston adaptation that became successful on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s was, in essence, a drawing-room horror melodrama.

It took film--a medium only in its infancy when Stoker wrote his clunky play, and still barely developed at the time of his death in 1912--to use location filming and movement to realize the full dramatic potential of Dracula.

One wonders, had Irving lived to see Bela Lugosi become a matinee idol playing the undead monster, if the actor-impresario would have reconsidered his rapid dismissal of a role that could have been his; if he would have wondered if it had been really worthwhile to take his ambitious assistant down a peg; or if he witnessed something in the role itself that reminded him of his own all-devouring nature, and blanched at the sight.