NEW YORK, D.C., Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Composer Frank Wildhorn's new Broadway offering, "Dracula, the Musical" with versatile actor Tom Hewitt in the title role, is the sort of show whose spectacular sets and incredible special effects get the applause rather than the hardworking cast trapped in an artificial show that is more pageant than emotionally engaging drama.
Even Wildhorn's well-known facility for melodic anthems and rousing orchestral effects that made "The Scarlet Pimpernel" a Broadway success a few seasons ago fails to save this latest stage version of Bram Stoker's enduring 1897 novel about the blood-sucking undead.
It probably won't be around long, so dyed-in-the-wool fans of the Transylvanian vampire had better get to the Belasco Theater box office as soon as possible.
The performance attended by this critic got one polite round of applause and no further curtain calls, let alone the standing ovation that has become standard procedure at most Broadway musicals. Even the tall, imposing Hewitt, who gives a resourceful, uncampy performance as Count Dracula, doesn't get a chance at a solo curtain call.
The show, directed by the highly regarded Des McAnuff, cost a reported $8 million and maybe more, much of it invested by reckless Dutch stage entrepreneur Joop van den Ende. It boasts one of Broadway's leading ladies, Melissa Errico, in the role of the beauteous English brunette, Mina Murray, whom Dracula chooses as the one great love of his immortal life.
As written, Mina is a two-dimensional character who gives Errico little chance to establish any real personality, although she sings gorgeously, especially her big second-act number, "If I Could Fly," and her duet with Dracula, "There's Always a Tomorrow." In the first act, she seems to be upstaged by her best friend, Lucy Westenra, who gets most of Dracula's attention and a big aria, "The Mist."
Lucy, pertly played by Kelli O'Hara as a blonde with a candy-box face, gets to die dramatically as the result of Dracula's fanged attentions, but Mina must live on, having stabbed Dracula to death at his own request to bring an end to his unbearable existence as a nighttime creature doomed to live on the blood of other humans.
There is no explanation as to how Dracula can be killed with a knife when all along the audience has been led to believe that vampires can only be vanquished by stakes through their hearts. But don't ask for logic in librettists Don Black and Christopher Hampton's twisted retelling of the Dracula legend, for it doesn't exist and when the play strives for humor it is only met with nervous tittering from the disenchanted audience especially when three vampirettes levitate wildly about the stage like amateur Rhine Maidens.
What is really enchanting about the show is Heidi Ettinger's set, rich in stained-glass windows and stage furnishings brilliantly fashioned in the convoluted Art Nouveau style of the turn of the past century.
The scenes are framed in what appear to be the expandable shutter of a giant camera, and Ettiger plays with perspective, giving it odd tilts to illustrate the otherworldliness of Stoker's story also suggested by Howell Binkley's eerie lighting and niagaras of stage fog. Catherine Zuber's elegant Victorian costumes are a delight, and her long velvet coats and lacey furbelows for Dracula trace his stage journey from an aged aristocrat to a passionate young suitor who only once changes into a bat.
Also outstanding in the cast is Shonn Wiley as Renfield, the fly- and spider-eating minion of Dracula who sort of holds the shaky plot together with the show's one terror-filled performance that can really produce goose-bumps. Stephen McKinley Henderson makes a bumptious Prof. Van Helsing, the vampire-hunter, and Darren Ritchie and Chris Hoch are fine as the men in Mina and Lucy's lives.
Billionaire Van den Ende, the show's major investor, has had a string of financial flops starting with Wildhorn's "Cyrano" in 1993 and continuing with Jim Steinman's "Dance of the Vampires" and Wildhorn's "Jekyll and Hyde," both of which are still running at theaters he owns in Europe long after their demise in the United States.
Last spring he saw a workshop production of "Dracula" -- first produced at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 2001. He liked it and ordered his production firm, Dodger Stage Holding, to bring it to Broadway.
The fact that Van den Ende lost $10 million on "Cyrano" and millions more on recent Broadway revivals of "Into the Woods" and "42nd Street" seems not to faze him an iota. He uses Broadway as a testing ground for presentation to European audiences who love schlock musicals. "Dracula" should be a big success in Budapest, the Romanian capital that is a stopping place for tourists en route to and from a visit to the count's ancestral castle in Transylvania.
Meanwhile look for Wildhorn's musical version of "Frankenstein," produced by Van den Ende, to hit Broadway in about 2006. Elton John and Bernie Taupin's adaptation of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Lestat" is scheduled for Broadway, too, opening as early as 2005.
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