THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR Thursday November 26, 1998 

Dashing Dracula desiccated by dialogue
Too much talk leaves Gothic melodrama dated    
by Stewart Brown

It's a debonair Dracula who's visiting the Waterdown Memorial Hall these nights.

That's where the Village Theatre hangs on to the Halloween spirit with a drawing-room melodrama about the world's most famous vampire.

Tara McMahon is the Count of Coagulation in the Villagers' first production of this season. Cloaked in red-lined black velvet, McMahon cuts a dashing figure as he tries to indulge in a little lethal necking.

Whenever McMahon's deep-voiced Dracula is around, things perk up, as they do when Michael Adkins' schizophrenic Renfield—dining on houseflies and spiders—bewails the hold that Dracula has on his soul. From McMahon, there's just enough hint of Continental charm and aristocracy without indulging in the Hollywood Hungarian excess with which Bela Lugosi lathered the role in Tod Browning's 1931 film. Otherwise, this 1925 script from John L. Balderstone and Hamilton Deane seems dated, static and talky.

Ideally, Dracula is a Gothic romance that begs for an expansive, eerie set full of dark corners. Waterdown director Arlene Carson goes for atmosphere through some ominous music, wolf howls, cackling and screams in the night, a hint of stage smoke, a broken mirror in each performance and a green light in which to bathe Dracula on his bloodthirsty midnight missions.

But it's hard to maintain suspense through so much talk by actors hemmed in by furniture.

The setting for most of the play is Dr. Seward’s London sanatorium for the insane. There, Seward (Ken Redish) and his medical friend, Abraham Von Helsing (Ross Kyler), expert on rare diseases, attempt to discover what's ailing Seward's daughter, Lucy (Jennifer Weddell). Her fiancé, Jonathan Harker (James Quin), is also keeping an attentive eye on things. So is the solicitous neighbour, Count Dracula, who's settled in the adjacent Castle Carfax on a visit from Transylvania. Why, Dracula even offers to donate his own blood to Lucy. ("Well, that's sporting of him!" acknowledges Jonathan, the boyfriend.)

Once it's determined that Lucy (a) is being threatened by a vampire and (b) Dracula is it, things liven up as Von Helsing, Seward and Harker plan Dracula's demise with a stake through the heart.

Until then, apart from Drac's visits and Renfield's histrionics —things are rather slow going, though the talk is helped by Kyler's deep, authoritative voice that suggests Dracula has met his match

Elsewhere, Weddell breaks out of Lucy's woe-is-me lassitude for a bit of vamping designed to get the corpuscles moving. And George Thomas connects on a spot of comedy as an asylum heavy making a move on Gail Edward's maid and bemoaning Renfield's elusiveness.

Dracula, by the way, won't disappear with the end of the Waterdown run. Next summer, the Stratford Festival will premiere a new musical version of the vampire story, written by TVO's Richard Ouzounian and Marek Norman.