Vamping the Vampire
He may be long in the tooth, but he never gets old. The big daddy of all vampires, Count Dracula is one of those characters that everyone knows, and his story has been told time and time again, never quite in the same way. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has been adapted hundreds of times for every imaginable medium. According to the program, Center REPertory Company’s production at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts uses the earliest stage version by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, but this is balderdash. Some scenes remain from the 1927 play that starred Bela Lugosi on Broadway in the 1920s and Frank Langella in the 1970s, leading to their respective Dracula movies*, but the bulk of it has been so radically rewritten for this production that it’s bizarre to see no adaptor credited.
