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.