Review: Fangs a lot

?Bram Stoker?s Dracula,? with Gary Oldman starring as the unkillable 19th Century Romanian count, was easily the 20th movie version of the novel Stoker had written in 1997.
Now, the tale is ?undead? all over again, in a new stage version by the unstoppable, and apparently equally unkillable, composer Frank Wildhorn, with an official title, ?Dracula, the Musical,? inflated, one supposes, to make it crystal clear to anyone approaching the venture that this is a vampire take that sings and dances, sort of.
To be truthful about it, what ?Dracula, the Musical? does vastly more of than either singing or dancing is flying, with more actors gliding, looping and darting through the air than could be found in a hundred productions of ?Peter Pan.?
Oddities abound in ?Dracula, the Musical.? One of them has to do with time and place. The Belasco Theatre?s Playbill lists the show?s time and place as ?Transylvania, England and across Europe, aboard the Orient Express a century ago.?
Heidi Ettinger?s elaborate, but resoundingly peculiar scenery is staggeringly Art Deco, paying homage to a design craze that didn?t come along, or at least didn?t take ferocious hold, until at least a decade or so later than the era in which director Dec McAnuff?s bizarre production is placed.
One key to this misbegotten treatment of Stoker?s story lies in the production?s attitude toward the title character himself. When Frank Langella played the role on Broadway in the 1977-78 season, the show, of course, was not a musical. Instead, it made use of a totally serious adaptation of Stoker?s novel, written decades earlier by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston and played for years by stock companies and resident theaters.
Langella, by report, was only on stage for something like 20 or 25 minutes, yet he scored the greatest success of his career and was nominated for a Tony Award. Langella?s Dracula was talked about, anticipated, but only briefly and fleetingly seen, which heightened and intensified the audience?s fascination with him. The production trusted the material, start to finish, and that belief paid off abundantly.
In ?Dracula, the Musical,? veteran actor Tom Hewitt is on the stage almost from start to finish, and he makes almost no impression at all.
Hardly the charismatic actor that Langella is, Hewett has been associated with more than one show firmly rooted in camp. On Broadway there was ?The Rocky Horror Show,? and off-Broadway, he played the lead in Paul Rudnick?s ?Jeffrey.?
Despite the actor?s history of work in such ventures, it isn?t his fault that the new show tips so lethally toward camp. One of his first lines, delivered when his visitor, Jonathan Harker, offers him a glass of claret, gives the game away.
?I?m not a wine drinker,? the count says, cueing he audience into stumbling into the trough of easy, shallow laughs a misstep from which neither they nor the show itself ever fully recovers.
If that kind of writing, on the part of a respected British playwright like Christopher Hampton, and his hack collaborator, lyricist Don Black, weren?t enough to derail a musical version of Stoker?s old war wagon, consider the circumstances under which Hewitt delivers the line.
The isolated old Romanian noble wears a gray wig and a flowing dressing gown, combining to make his resemble, more than anything else, the late character actress Maria Ouspenskaya.
It?s a goofy impression that Hewett never manages to overcome. How could he, with myriad stunts and tricks going on around him, while Wildhorn?s mainly-synthesizer score rumbles on unceasingly?
The composer?s one-tune-fits-all melodies have been compared, many more times than once, to the mock-lyrical things ice skaters like to use in their routines.
Here, as before, in shows like ?Jekyll & Hyde,? ?The Scarlet Pimpernel,? and the composer?s one fast flop, ?The Civil War,? the music has a stupefying anonymity, with each number seeming to vanish almost before it?s been fully performed.
Of the singing actors only the gallant Melissa Errico, as Dracula?s beloved, Mina Murray, manages to save herself, mainly by virtue of her fine voice, her astonishing diction, and, it would seem, her ability to convince an audience that she actually believes in the third-rate hand she?s been dealt on this occasion.
And then there?s the matter of all that meaningless swooping and gliding, referred to in the program as ?flying by Foy,? and ?Aerial Staging? credited to veteran dancer and Martha Clarke colleague Rob Besserer. The Foy company is, of course, famous for its success in getting generation after generation of otherwise earthbound Peter Pans airborne.
?Dracula, the Musical? might, it seems, have benefited from the services of an experience air traffic controller, as winsome female vampires speed from portal to portal, while Ittinger?s odd scenery ebbs and flows, featuring here huge doors that rise from the theater?s cellar only to sink again, apparently innocent of specific motivation.
Meanwhile, horizontal and vertical elements of the stage curtain, bearing images of gargoyles and what appear to be funerary decorations hewn from stone, iris in and iris out, functioning somewhat in the manner of a gigantic camera lens, with the bottom portion sometimes rising to mask some of the production?s more awkward effects. To cite just one example, there?s a moment when the seemingly motionless Dracula glides across the stage floor, riding a platform that the risen curtain segment keeps out of audience view.
Such effects are meant to invoke ?magic,? but they really reflect the production?s thudding paucity of genuine imagination.

The real Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker survives as a footnote in the annals of Irish literature. Actually, he?s vastly more interesting than that.
Born in 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent in the Fairview section of Dublin, Stoker was educated at TCD, and, like many other Irish writers, went to work for the civil service, meanwhile indulging his love of the theater by contributing unpaid play reviews to the Evening Mail.
In 1876, the actor-manager Sir Henry Irving did a Dublin season, became acquainted with young Stoker, and, two years later hired him as a management assistant, a post the Dubliner kept until his employer?s death in 1905.
Irving was, by all reports, a ridiculously demanding and possessive master, but Stoker somehow found time to write a dozen novels, of which only ?Dracula? remains widely in print. The book was, in a sense, influenced by the work of another Irishman, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was celebrated as a maser of the macabre and the mysterious, and the novel that is widely thought to have left its mark on Stoker and on ?Dracula? was ?Carmilla,? another vampire tale.
Le Fanu, by coincidence, owned the evening Mail when Stoker wrote his reviews for the paper and served as something of a mentor for the younger man. He died in his Merrion Square home in 1873, almost a full quarter century before Stoker, remembering ?Carmilla,? wrote ?Dracula.?
After Irving died, life became difficult for Bram Stoker, and both his health and his fortunes declined. In 1906, with Irving dead only a year, Stoker wrote ??Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving.?
He appears not to have written much in the final years of his life, and, as Le Fanu had done, lived a somewhat reclusive life. Surprisingly, Stoker lived into the 20 Century, dying in 1912 at the age of 65, survived by his wife and his only son.
The Playbill for ?Dracula, the Musical? contains no biographical information on Bram Stoker, and, in fact, no information on him at all.
One thing on which his biographers seem to agree is that, in some way and to some extent, Bram Stoker believed in the existence of vampires. If even one of the forces behind the new stage adaptation had even the vaguest conviction, ?Dracula, the Musical? might have emerged as a tolerably enjoyable musical.
Faith, however, appears to have been in extremely short supply where this particular effort is concerned.