Introduction

The vampire is an inherently theatrical monster, and the vampire has also been a strong stage presence for over two centuries. Much of the imagery associated with vampires in general and with Dracula in particular emerged out of staged vampire plays. In other words, the pop culture image of vampires, especially of Dracula, comes from the theater first and foremost. Every vampire is an actor, a performer pretending to be human, “the subterfuge necessary to keep their game going,” as Michael Chemers terms it (2018: 94), or embodying and performing their vampiric identity. “The vampire’s existence ultimately depends on its skills as a performer; it is never annihilated except when it fails as an actor to disguise its true nature” (Chemers 2018: 94). Lastly, the vampire has been a significant presence in Western theater since 1820. What follows is a brief history of vampires on the Western stage, not comprehensive, but a survey and a summary of exemplary stage vampires.

In her foundational analysis Our Vampires, Ourselves , Nina Auerbach argues that modern vampires are all “children of Hamlet’s ghost” and that “King Hamlet’s ‘gigantic shadowy form’ permeates and dignifies nineteenth century vampires” (1995: 20, 28). Auerbach traces both Ruthven and Dracula back to Shakespeare, arguing for theatrical origins of the modern vampire. Early theatrical vampires could easily be conflated with ghosts, as they were perceived as insubstantial and incorporeal – the vampire could enter locked rooms, emerge from the floor or ceiling, and could not be harmed by traditional weapons. Hamlet’s ghost, argues Auerbach, is conflated with the folk vampire to become Ruthven and eventually Dracula, which implies a theatrical inspiration for the contemporary modern vampire.

Nineteenth Century Vampire Theater

A vogue for vampire plays on the stages on London began in 1820, fueled by Polidori’s The Vampyre (Stuart 1995: 3). This makes the vampire one of the oldest stage monsters in the West, second only to ghosts, witches, and the devil. For the next seventy years, a stream of stage vampires, followed by a stream of stage vampire satires and parodies, were a mainstay of the British stage. The vampire on stage is a remarkable thing, even in comedies and parodies, as what distinguishes the theater from literature is embodiment, and what distinguishes the theater from cinema is the quality of liveness – that actor-as-vampire and audience are present in the same physical space.

Polidori’s novel was dramatized as Le Vampire, a melodrama by Charles Nodier with additional material by Achille, Marquis of Jouffrey and Pierre-Frederic-Adolphe Carmouche at the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin in Paris, which premiered June 13, 1820, and the floodgates opened. The play was instantly “wildly popular” (Dodd 2020: 28), and thus instantly imitated. On June 15, a farce called Le Vampire , a parody of Polidori set in Hungary, opened at the Vauedville, and a few days after that Le trois Vampires, ou le chair de la lune opened at the Varieties. Within the next few months four more vampire comedies: Encore un Vampire, Les Etrennes d’un Vampire, Cadet Buteux, Vampire, and Le Vampire, mélodrame en trois actes, were performed on the stages of Paris (Melton 1994: 194). Montague Summers reports, “Immediately upon the furore created by Nodier’s Le Vampire…vampire plays of every kind from the most luridly sensational to the most farcically ridiculous pressed on the boards. A contemporary critic cries, ‘There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire!’” (1928: 290).

Nodier’s play was a rather straightforward adaptation of Polidori’s novel, calling the vampire “Rutwen,” with two exceptions: first, he moved the story from Turkey and Greece to Scotland, and second, Ruthven dies at the end, defeated by the heroes. It was then translated and adapted by J(ames) R(obinson) Planché into English as the melodrama The Vampire; or The Bride of the Isles (1820), and kept the story in Scotland (Nina Auerbach theorizes this is because “Scottish costumes were available to his company” (1995: 22)). This version opened at the English Opera House on August 9, 1820. Planché’s unique contribution was making Ruthven more sympathetic. W.T. Montcrieff adapted Nodier’s play under the name The Vampire in 1820 as well, premiering August 22 at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London (Dodd 2020: 32). Planché’s play was then adapted into The Bride of the Isles, a Tale Founded on the Popular Legend of the Vampire by an anonymous author, in which the vampire is directly in league with the Christian devil and must marry a virgin on Halloween, kill her, and drink her blood (Dodd 2020: 34).

Nodier’s play continued to be adapted across Europe. Heinrich Ludwig Ritter adapted Nodier’s play into German in 1821. In something of an echo chamber, composer Peter Joseph von Lindpainter and librettist Cäsar Max Heigel created the opera Der Vampyr, noting it was “nach Byron,” (after Byron), attributing Polidori’s novel to the poet as frequently happened during this period (Dodd 2021: 192.). Der Vampyr, a different opera by Heinrich Marschner was performed in Leipzig and London in 1828. J. R. Planché then adapted the German opera into English, but oddly kept the German title: Der Vampyr . Planché’s latest version of the story premiered at the English Opera House in 1829. Lastly, Ludwig Tieck, inspired by Polidori, wrote “Wake not the Dead,” which was adapted by George Blink as The Vampire Bride in 1834.

Alexandre Dumas, who loved Nodier’s play, premiered his version, Le Vampire, at the Ambrigue-Comique in Paris on December 20, 1851. Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, best known for his melodramas The Poor of New York (1857) and The Octoroon (1859), assailed two versions of Polidori’s tale for the stage. The first, The Vampire, marked Boucicault’s début as a leading actor, appearing as the vampire Sir Alan Raby, his version of Lord Ruthven, and premiering at Princess’s Theatre on June 14, 1852 (Dodd 2021, 200). Rewriting the play for American audiences, the new version, now called The Phantom opened at the National Theater in Philadelphia on May 12, 1856. Augustus Harris then adapted Dumas’ play as Ruthven in 1959. In short, from 1820 to 1860, over a dozen versions of Polidori’s novel were adapted to the stage as melodramas and operas, enabling a veritable community of vampires to preside over the stages of Europe (see Dodd 2020; Dodd 2021; Stuart 1994 for much more detailed analyses of the variety of Ruthven-inspired plays).

The multiplicity and diversity of vampire plays prompted the invention of new stage technology: the Vampire Trap. The Vampire Trap, developed at the English Opera House, “a London stage of marginal repute that was well suited as a venue for melodrama” (Chemers 2018: 85), was a mechanism that was a trap door (as the name suggests) that propelled the actor playing Ruthven either up or down through the stage floor, appearing or disappearing out of nowhere or in a cloud of mist or smoke. It also allowed for the vampire to seem to float across the stage and then disappear through a trapdoor in the scenery. In other words, it allowed for uncanny entrances and exits by the vampire character and then allowed for uncanny movement on the stage, reinforcing the illusion that the character had supernatural powers. The Vampire Trap was used most effectively in productions of The Vampire; or The Bride of the Isles and similar plays.

The vampire play was popular for a number of reasons: the melodrama, the exoticism, the potential for drama. On the nineteenth century stage, according to Rosemary Ellen Guiley, “The vampire provided the ideal camouflage because it could commit sexual violation without involving the genitals…The vampire enabled an exploitation of dark side of sexual fantasy while pretending to condemn it” (sic) (2005: 13). An advertisement for an 1826 English production of Planché’s The Vampire reads, in part:

THIS PIECE IS FOUNDED ON the various traditions concerning THE VAMPIRES…

They are permitted to roam the Earth, in whatever form they please, with Supernatural Powers of Fascination –.

And they cannot be destroyed, as long as they sustain their dreadful Existence, by imbibing the BLOOD OF FEMALE VICTIMS…

The text is salacious, and suggestive of the advertising of horror from the fifties to the present: monsters with powers to make people do things, people like beautiful women in their night wear! Part of the appeal, the pleasure of stage horror is that if the vampire body is horrific and uncanny, the bodies of his victims are sensual and equally physically present. The stage vampire could evade the censors like no human character ever could; the suggestion of the supernatural allowed for risque and heavily sexualized interactions all while seeming to condemn them. “Putting vampire in title of a production guaranteed an audience” (sic) (Guiley 2005: 13). Stage vampires literally were the embodiment of sexuality and the private made public. Lord Ruthven (under his many names in the different adaptations) could easily slip into a young virgin’s bedroom (as Dracula would later with Lucy Westenra). Nineteenth century vampires represented a kind of forbidden sexuality that was publicly presented in the face of Victorian morality; just as in the late twentieth century, the vampire would become a symbol of Queer sexuality in such plays as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, The Vampires, and Lestat.

Dracula and the Stage

Stoker was an unpaid theater critic for Dublin’s Evening Mail when his review of Henry Irving’s 1876 Hamlet came to Irving’s attention. The actor invited the critic to private performances and meals, eventually inviting Stoker to join the Lyceum Theatre as its manager in 1878. His new job proved eye-opening for Stoker, who had experienced theater from the outside as a critic, but was now in the thick of it. “Now I began to understand why everything was as it was,” he wrote in his reminiscences of Irving (Stoker 1906: 53). Stoker became an excellent manager of the theater and his writings reflect both a deep understanding of the theater itself and of his own complicated relationship with Irving. So not only was the author of the book a man of the theater, but the titular character is also actually a product of the stage.

Scholars and biographers virtually all agree, and Barbara Belford argues conclusively in her book Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula that the actual character of Dracula was inspired by and based upon Henry Irving (Belford 2002; Belford 1996: 270). “Like Dracula, Irving was tall, thin, with a saturnine appearance” and a hypnotic voice (1996: 191). In his personal reminiscences of Irving, Stoker admits to being enthralled, almost entranced, the first time he met Irving. The power, the presence, the charisma, the vanity, the arrogance, the cruelty, and the sensuality. Stoker had hoped Irving would want to play the count on stage. Irving, however, as noted before, was not interested. David J. Skal also argues for the influence of actor Herbert Beerbohn Tree as Svengali in the 1895 stage adaptation of George du Maurier’s Trilby (2004: 48). Like Dracula, Svengali could hypnotize and mesmerize people, especially young women. Nina Auerbach advocates for Oscar Wilde as a third inspiration for the character of the count, particularly after the 1895 trials of Wilde for “Gross Indecency,” further linking vampirism both with Queer identity and with the so-called deviant sexuality (1995: 83–4).

Whether Irving or Tree or both, however, the most famous vampire was inspired by the great fin de siècle performers, and is, in fact, a performer himself. Theatrical presence is found in much of the novel. Not in the presence of stages or plays, but in the idea of performance itself. Irving was a consummate performer who would often demonstrate how he could use his techniques to transform himself into a variety of characters in order to manipulate an audience. It is no stretch to say that Dracula himself is such an actor. When we first encounter him, Dracula is performing at being a human, a role he will continue for much of the novel. He acts as being a living being, fooling first Harker, who only sees through the count’s performance when he encounters vampire women not bothering to act human, and then the people in London. Indeed, our heroes are shocked when Van Helsing moves the theory that Dracula is a vampire. Quickly they learn, not least of which from the convincing evidence of the Bloofer Lady, and the story of the returned Harker, that the man they thought of as odd but charming foreigner is indeed the un-dead, a monstrous being, a vampire. Upon discovery, however, Dracula then plays the vampire king to the hilt – he appears, as Harker notes, “with the red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.” He flies into rages and shows his ferocity when attacking Renfield and Mina. He literalizes Irving’s metaphor by transforming himself into other forms. Stuart also sees echoes of Irving’s performances in Dracula’s, singling out Irving’s Mephistopheles, Macbeth, and the Flying Dutchman as performative influences on Stoker’s fictional vampire. Count Dracula performs his roles of human, vampire king, and personification of evil; Stoker transformed Irving’s stage monsters into his fictional one, who is also a performer.

Dracula and Ruthven have set the model for vampire as performer. Popular culture has embraced the idea of vampire as performer. From Blacula in the seventies to Jerry Dandrige in Fright Night and Max in The Lost Boys in the eighties to the eternal high school students of Twilight the vampire performs at being an ordinary human. This is the basis of the joke for Regular Human Bartender Jackie Daytona who serves regular human beer in the television program What We Do in the Shadows. The vampires of that television show (and the film which inspired it) are so cluelessly unaware that they do not understand what horrible performers they are. The joke is, however, that humans are even more monumentally stupid, so we allow them to pass as just odd people. Similarly, the sexy vampires of Key & Peele have a self-realization moment when Tyrell tells the other vampires they try too hard and the whole “sexy vampire” thing seems desperate and gratuitous. These two parody moments, however, tell us something about the vampire: the vampire is a performer, always. Either vampires perform very much not to seem like a vampire or perform trying very much to seem like a vampire. The only off stage moment is in the casket, otherwise, like a fading comedian, the vampire is always “on.”

The first stage appearance of Dracula was on May 18, 1897, organized as a staged reading by Stoker at the Lyceum Theatre in order to establish and protect dramatic copyright of the text. Lyceum actors were pressed into service, with T. Arthur Jones playing the eponymous vampire, Edith Craig (the daughter of Ellen Terry) playing Mina, Herbert Passmore as Harker, Tom Reynolds as Van Helsing, and eleven other performers (Skal 2004: 40). Only two paid ticket holders attended, the rest of the spartan audience consisting of staff and company members of the Lyceum (Buzzwell 2014). The Lyceum, tangentially, was the theater that had premiered Planché’s The Vampire back in 1820, and had a working “vampire trap” – an elaborate bit of stage machinery that would allow the vampire to appear supernaturally (Stuart 1994: 193; Wynne 2019: 165). Stoker had asked Henry Irving to play the eponymous character, and Irving declined, although he attended the reading and responded, “Dreadful,” when asked what he thought of it (Belford 1996: 270). The count would not return to the stage until twelve years after Stoker’s death in 1912.

Hamilton Deane, a member of the Henry Irving Vacation Company in 1899, had become a manager and writer in his own right by the early twenties. Stoker’s widow Florence gave him permission to adapt the novel for the stage, which he did in 1924, opening first in the provinces before bringing the show first to London’s Little Theatre with Raymond Huntley in the title role and Deane himself as Van Helsing, transferring first to the Duke of York’s Theatre and then the Prince of Wales Theatre. The show was then brought to the United States with additional script changes by John L. Balderston to make the play more comprehensible to Americans. Under the title Dracula: The Vampire Play , this version premiered on Broadway to the same acclaim Deane’s version did in London. This play was then famously revived in 1977 with Frank Langella in the title role (later replaced by Raul Julia) and designs by Edward Gorey (see Deane and Balderston 1993).

Deane’s adaptation contributed greatly to the public perception of Dracula and Dracula. Deane is the one who dressed the count in Edwardian formal wear with a cape for the practical reason of saving money by then wearing the costume himself to dinner parties after performances (McNally and Florescu 1994: 157). Deane developed a variant on the vampire trap that allowed him to drop out of the high-collared cape, thus leaving the cape to collapse in a heap as if the vampire had just vanished or transformed into a bat. Deane also invented the publicity device of having a uniformed nurse at performances in case anyone fainted from fright. So successful was the show that any time Deane’s company needed money they would stage Dracula as it always sold out at a huge profit, even years later (McNally and Florescu 1994:157).

The star of the Broadway version of the play, Hungarian actor Bela Blasko had been cast as the title role, changing his name to Bela Lugosi and achieved critical success in the role. He learned his lines phonetically, as he did not speak English well when first cast in the role. When Carl Laemmle Jr. purchased the motion picture rights to Dracula, (based on the play – not the novel) because of the Broadway success of the Deane/Balderston play, Carl Laemmle Sr. wanted Lon Chaney to play the Count. Chaney passed away before filming could begin and Laemmle Sr. grudgingly said the “Broadway actor” could do it, thus forever linking Dracula with Lugosi and Lugosi with Dracula, and setting the standard for all the film adaptations that would follow. As noted, the 1931 Universal film was not adapted from the novel, but from the dramatic adaptation of the novel, Hamilton and Deane’s stage version (see also Wynne 2018).

At the end of his career, Lugosi returned to the stage as Dracula, hoping that a success in London’s West End would return him to the screen as the count, hopeful as well for a Broadway revival and perhaps even a technicolor remake of Dracula with him once again in the title role. The production of Dracula – The Vampire Play toured the United Kingdom from April 30 to October 13, 1951, with Lugosi assaying the count 229 times. The revival, however, failed to lead to a West End run or the hoped-for films. When Lugosi hung up his cape in Portsmouth on the evening of October 13 it was the last time he ever played Dracula on stage, although a few final low-budget film appearances back in the United States, including the famed ones with Ed Wood, were how he concluded his career (Guiley 2005: 188–9).

The challenges to anyone seeking to put Dracula on stage are manifold. The novel’s form is epistolary and the novel itself is sprawling in terms of geography, time, and population, with hundreds of individuals from the Borgo Pass to Varna to Whitby to London. The novel has also become rather well-known, and yet some things that are assumed to be common knowledge are not found in the novel. For example, Dracula walks around in daytime and even in sunlight and he is not killed by a stake through the heart but by having his head cut off and being stabbed with a knife. Yet virtually every stage adaptation has Dracula unable to walk in sunlight (taken from Murnau’s Nosferatu, not Stoker’s Dracula) and kills the count with a stake through the heart.

Most stage adaptations rely upon reduction. What this usually means, (but not always) is most scripts cut out Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris entirely. The best example of this technique can be found in the Deane/Balderston version. A cast of eight play Dracula, Van Helsing, Seward, Harker, Renfield, a maid and “Butterworth,” an attendant in Seward’s sanatorium. Mina and Lucy are combined into a single character named Lucy Seward, who is Seward’s daughter engaged to Harker. The action of the play is limited to Seward’s library, Lucy’s bedroom, and, at the finale, the crypt of Dracula under Carfax (Deane and Balderston 1993). In other words, the scope of the novel is considerably narrowed to a small group of people in London and the form is a naturalistic melodrama. The stage adaptation shifts from the epistolary novel, which takes the structure of a variety of forms – letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, ships’ logs, etc. – and presents the narrative as a linear, straightforward, naturalistic drama, which was the dominant form of drama in the anglophone world at the time.

Many stage adaptations of Dracula also involve shift of narrative focus, most often to the women – Mina and Lucy (even more than the title character) are the stars of the show. While such a reduction loses scope and form, there are benefits to be found, as in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, which she calls a “free adaptation,” set in Whitby with Lucy and Mina as sisters. Lucy is sexually cognizant while Mina is deeply repressed. Lochhead uses the play as an exploration of Victorian sexual morality and class, and asks why we find vampires so attractive. What Stoker has as buried subtext, Lochhead places literally center stage under the lights. Similarly, in New York-based playwright Mac Wellman’s Swoop, by focusing on a singular aspect or character of the novel, the playwright adapting the work can illuminate some of the dark corners of the novel, and allow us to see it with new eyes. In 1994 Wellman had done a very traditional adaptation of Dracula, again with a cast of twelve and told from the perspective of Lucy and Mina, sexually aware women “already surrounded by the dead hulks of Victorian masculinity” (Wellman 1995: 10). Indeed, the play suggests Dracula may only exist as their imagined fantasy as the embodiment of unrepressed sexuality in the face of Harker and Van Helsing’s puritan formality. Swoop, on the other hand, featured Lucy, Mina’s Id, Mina’s superego, and Dracula as characters. Set in contemporary Manhattan, the play opens with Dracula offering a monologue of his own history, which involves a variety of names and historic places and his favorite eclipses, but is internally inconsistent. Mina, now a vampire, then speaks herself, discoursing on time and forgetting behind her monologue lies a postmodern understanding of reality, rejecting the Victorian/Edwardian science and rationalism underlying both Stoker’s novel and the society that produced it. Lucy then offers her perspective: “The gothic traditions of the vampiric have no appeal to me. I happen from moment to moment and have no use for fixed conceptions of myself” (1995: 92). It is a song of self-creation and rejection of the ideas of the gothic and the monstrous. Lucy and Mina are self-actualized, transcending the previous vampire brides of the count and recognizing the terror and boredom of their existence. “Happiness,” Lucy closes the play, “is the coffin lid, closed for all time” (1995: 98).

The seventies demonstrated a variety of dramatic approaches to Dracula. In 1970 and 1971 the Judson Poets’ Theater, followed by the Theatre for New City presented avant garde playwright Leon Katz’s Dracula Sabbat, a blending of Stoker’s novel and pieces of The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a ritualistic Black Mass. The year 1970 also saw the premiere of Bruce Ronald’s Dracula, Baby, a hip musical version of the vampire narrative. The off-Broadway venue The Cherry Lane Theatre presented an adaptation by Bob Hall and David Richmond entitled The Passion of Dracula , premiering on September 28, 1977, just three weeks before the Broadway revival of the Dean-Balderston Dracula. This adaptation focused on the seduction of Mina Murray by the count, with several other local girls being drained of blood before a trio of doctors, including Seward, a young reporter, and an English lord join forces to kill the count. In 1982, Ron Magrid, clearly under the influence of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), wrote Dracula Tyrannus: The Tragical History of Vlad the Impaler, conflating Stoker’s fictional monster with his Wallachian namesake.

Adapting Dracula through comedy or for children often comes from the same impulse: the familiarity (or overfamiliarity) of the character due to cinema and popular culture, which allows the adaptor to “play.” The challenge, therefore, for the adapter, is to find ways to reinvent and reinvest the horror and uncanniness of the count to make a horror drama for adults. However, this overfamiliarity with Dracula also makes adapting the narrative as a comedy or for children considerably easier. For example, physical comedy collective La Navete Bete offers a four-person, metatheatrical adaptation of Stoker’s novel which claims, as the title suggests, it will tell the truth about the novel. Dracula: The Bloody Truth (2017) claims that the original novel was fact. The play relies upon cross-dressing, double entendres, dense characters, four actors playing forty characters, and double coding (phrases that mean different things to different audiences) to make Dracula silly. The one takeaway, however, is that one must actually know something of Dracula to get most of the jokes. The comedies require at least a pop culture knowledge of the character and the narrative for the humor to work.

Comedic Dracula has the same effect as children’s Dracula – the domestication of the vampire. In the former, through humor, in the latter, in order to make the monster “safe” for children. Children’s theater is Dracula domesticated. For comedy or for kids, he is reduced to his component elements – his appearance (derived as much from the Universal film and Bela Lugosi as anything Stoker wrote), the fact that he drinks blood, can turn into a bat, wolf, or mist, cannot be seen in a mirror, and can only be killed by sunlight or a stake. In other words, Stoker’s complex, historic, monstrous antihero is reduced down to just being a vampire and that is all he is. A vampire particularly interested in Mina and Lucy and perhaps other women. The result in most dramas is the infantilization of the vampire – he is NOT an actor, or an ancient, erudite aristocrat – both victims and vampire are children. The latter is a monstrous one – an orally fixated id with who flies into rages (temper tantrums?), makes demands, wants to consume and possess all, irrational and violent, not a modern vampire but the child-as-vampire and vampire-as-child. As a result most stage adaptations for children have no gore, no serious violence, nor horrific implications – merely a teenage Dracula who is annoyed that he is not respected and is an unwelcome presence.

Straightforward reductive adaptations for young audiences, of which there are dozens if not hundreds in English alone, have been about since the 1970s. John Mattera’s 1980 adaptation is entield, “Dracula, Based on the Book by Bram Stoker.” The language of adaptation tends to show the attitude toward the original: “book by,” “Inspired by the Bram Stoker Novel” or “Freely Adapted from,” all of which seem to suggest a “faithful adaptation.” In Mattera’s version we meet Lucy’s parents, Henry and Martha. This is also the rare play in which Arthur Holmwood is present, but Quincy Morris is removed. The action mostly follows the bare bones of Stoker’s novel.

Steven Hotchner’s 1975 adaptation is actually a trilogy of one-acts: Escape From Dracula’s Castle, Death at the Crossroads, and The Possession of Lucy Wenstrom can be performed individually as one acts or as a combined full length version, simply called Dracula. Dracula adapted by William McNulty (2008) is arguably one of the most produced versions. Written in 2008, it has had 219 productions in last two decades, predominantly high schools and community groups in many American states, as well as at schools in Canada, Ireland, and Indonesia. Tim Kelly’s Dracula: The Vampire Play (1978), premiered in London’s West End in 1978, a year after the Broadway revival of the Deane/Balderston script. Although obviously aimed at mature audiences, it has since become a staple of high school performances, topping McNulty’s version by a few hundred productions. Kelly’s version, like Ron Magrid’s play, above, was clearly influenced by the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), as his Dracula claims to Mina and Van Helsing to be “a direct descendant of Vlad the Impaler” (1978: 38). As with other adaptations, the characters are reduced and interchanged. Dr. Quincy is now the psychiatrist who runs a sanitarium. Lucy is his niece, engaged to Arthur Holmwood. As with the Deane-Balderston adaptation, servants and other characters are introduced: Nurse Cassidy, Mrs. Fern the Housekeeper, Flora the maid, Miss Anya, the nurse from Romania who escorted Harker home to England, and, inexplicably, Lucy’s mother. Lucy is saved and Dracula is slain when she manages to keep him in her bedchamber until the sun rises, an ending lifted directly from Nosferatu, not Stoker’s novel.

Kelly himself has become a one-man Dracula adaptation factory, returning to Stoker again and again for variants on the novel: Dracula: The Vampire Play, Lady Dracula, The Dracula Kidds, Renfield of the Spiders and Flies, Young Dracula or The Singing Bat, Seven Brides for Dracula (AKA Seven Wives for Dracula), and Dracula: The Twilight Years, all of which were written for school and community groups, where they found varying degrees of popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition to Kelly, numerous other Dracula-inspired dramas were written and performed: Dracula in Love by Renee Rebman, Dracula in Paradise by Tom Jordan, Drac’s Back by Craig Sodaro, Midlife Dracula by Dennis Snee, The Count Will Rise Again or, Dracula in Dixie by Dennis Snee, Dracula: A Modern Fable by Norman Bein, Dracula: A Pain in the Neck, Countess Dracula by Neal de Brock, The Dracula Spectacula by John Gardiner, Andrew Parr, all of which (and more) present the vampire from childhood to retirement and beyond the grave, in love, and in a variety of geographical, historical, cultural, and social contexts, which also reflect the cultural context of Dracula and horror narratives at the time the play was written. For example, Gene Donovan’s 1958 I Was a Teenage Dracula, written at the height of the “I was a teenage…” films, introduces Steve Dracca, a teen born in America, raised in Transylvania, and now, after the death of his parents, back in a group home in the American midwest. Young Marlene, who has seen every horror film made and is a self-proclaimed vampire expert, believes Steve to be Dracula, but her friend Sue simply wants to go steady with him. Confusion and hijinks reign until the mystery of Steve is all straightened out (not a vampire!).

Dracula frequently shows up in what we shall term monster mashes, best seen in popular culture such as The Monster Squad , Hotel Transylvania and the Universal “House of” movies. One theatrical example from dozens available is the musical I’m Sorry the Bridge is Out, You’ll Have to Spend the Night by Sheldon Allman and Bobby Pickett (the latter best known for the novelty hit “Monster Mash”) which features Dracula, a wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, Doctor Frankenstein and a Mummy, not to mention several of Dracula’s wives.

Of all the Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) adaptations, Don Fleming’s (1982) is actually the closest to Stoker’s novel in form and content and perhaps the most disturbing version. It starts in the Borgo Pass, moves to England and then returns to the Borgo Pass. While still reducing the scope of the play, does not avoid or lessen the horror for its youthful audience. The Brides want Harker, a distraught voice is heard off stage screaming, “Monster, give me back my baby” (1982: 13). The stage directions indicate that Dracula gives the three brides a moving sack with an infant’s cries coming from it (1982: 13–14). The screams of the mother and the cries of the baby are then drowned out by the howling of wolves as the lights fade and the brides tear open the sack. Though nothing is shown, through sound nothing is left to the imagination. Quincy and Arthur are present in this version, joining Harker, Seward and Van Helsing in their quest to save Mina and Lucy and end Dracula. Later, Vampire Lucy drains a child’s blood on stage, Dracula drinks Mina’s blood and in full view of the audience, cuts his own chest and forces her to drink his blood.

Debra Ross’s review of Rodchester, New York’s PUSH Physical Theatre production of Dracula asks whether or not it is appropriate for children. Ross observes: “But Dracula demands a level of processing and reflection about issues that people younger than about 13 or so have not yet encountered, or are only beginning to encounter: issues of devotion to good and the temptation of evil, of faith and reason, of sexuality and, mostly, of death, death of the body and of the soul.” Yet most of the current stage adaptations of Dracula are aimed at school and community groups and are performed either for or by young people. The question of whether or not certain productions of Dracula are acceptable for children contains within it the presupposition that Dracula is a usually a show for children, not an unusual expectation given the sheer amount of Dracula-related culture produced for children, from animated shows to breakfast cereals.

In October 2018 the Columbus Children’s Theatre did Steven Dietz’s adaptation of Dracula. Margaret Quamme’s review for the Columbus Dispatch notes many of the challenges inherent in putting Dracula on stage, aimed at young audiences:

it’s a tricky choice for a children’s theater to carry off. CCT recommends the show for kids in fourth grade or older [roughly ten year olds], and certainly those younger than that shouldn’t be there.

The deaths, assaults, and blood-letting, not to mention the eerie darkness and some remarkable special effects, are likely to give younger viewers nightmares, and parents would be well advised to consider their individual children before deciding whether this is an appropriate show even for those older than nine or ten.

Because this is an accurate rendition of a flowery nineteenth century text, it’s loaded with language that elementary school kids aren’t likely to have heard, and flashbacks and jumps in time are likely to be confusing. At nearly two and a half hours, the play will strain the patience of some young theatergoers.

For any or all of the reasons above, several families walked out during the first act of Thursday’s opening night performance.

It is fascinating that possibly the most “authentic” Dracula on an American stage, the one closest to the novel, so much so that it was challenging to its audiences, was a children’s theater production done at Halloween in Ohio.

Post-Dracula Stage Vampires

In addition to Dracula variants and adaptations, four or five dozen plays that engage with vampires have seen significant productions in the anglophone theater world. An exemplary production is Snoo Wilson’s Vampire (1973) in which the vampire is revealed as a metaphor for oppression of women. Each of the three acts examines the vampires, both literal and metaphorical of respective periods of English history, from the Victorians’ prudishness to the sadomasochism culture of the seventies.

The year 1984 was a banner year for vampire plays on the stages of New York. Harry Kondoleon’s The Vampires was performed at the Astor Place Theatre starting on April 11 after premiering at Seatle’s Empty Space Theatre in January. The play concerns Ed, a carpenter-turned-playwright, whose play is savaged by his brother Ian, a theater critic who believes he is a vampire. Ed then brings the entire family together to remount the play, demonstrating that every single member of the family is living off the blood of the other members, metaphorically speaking.

The other plays from that year focus on the vampire as camp figure and as queer-centered. First performed at the Limbo Lounge in New York City’s East Village in 1984, where it became so popular it moved to Off-Broadway in June of 1985, running for five years at the Provincetown Playhouse, Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (2001) narrates the historic rivalry between two immortal vampire lesbians (played by men in drag) from ancient Sodom to 1920s Hollywood and contemporary Las Vegas. The play is high camp, playfully narrating their eternal conflict through a queer lens. A vampire also appears in Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep (1989) , also first produced in 1984, a camp deconstruction of gothic penny dreadfuls. Irma Vep is, in fact, an anagram of the word “vampire,” an important plot point in the play. In Sean Michael Welch’s Earl the Vampire (2013), Hampton is a vampire who wants to out himself in public, goes on television, and reveals vampires to the world, demanding they be treated as a recognized and protected minority group. The eponymous Earl, an evil vampire, wants to maintain the status quo in this obvious comedy about acceptance of gay people.

The transformation of the vampire in post-millennial popular culture also manifests in the theater. Irish playwright Conor McPherson first came to prominence with his 1997 full length monologue Saint Nicholas, in which a cynical drama critic pursues a young actress who introduces him to a coven of modern vampires. Tainted Blood (2010, first performed 1998 in Los Angeles) by Tom Jacobson offers a metatheatrical satire, as Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle match wits against a real vampire. Suzy McKee Charnas, perhaps best known for her 1980 novel The Vampire Tapestry , adapted that story for the stage in 2001 as Vampire Dreams, in which two-thousand-year-old vampire Edward Weyland, who poses as a professor, is required to attend therapy and explores who and what he is with his therapist. Qui Nguyen’s Living Dead in Denmark , (2008) first produced in 2006, influenced by comic books, anime, pop culture vampires, and video games to create a Shakespearean mashup of vampire king Hamlet being fought by Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, and Juliet, all trained as vampire hunters. Nguyen is co-artistic director of a Brooklyn-based theater company called Vampire Cowboys. Soul Samurai (2010, performed 2009) features a young Asian-American woman named Dewdrop, trained in martial arts, who fights vampires in post-apocalyptic Brooklyn. Richard Nathan’s 2011 play Hamlet, Prince of Darkness, performed at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre in Los Angeles, imagines Hamlet as a vampire as well. Jack Thorne’s stage adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and film Let the Right One In premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in November 2013 under the direction of John Tiffany. On January 20, 2015, the play made its New York debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to critical acclaim.

Vampire Musicals and Ballets

Kayleigh Donaldson has observed, “It’s a truth universally acknowledged that vampires and musicals don’t mix” (2019), and yet artists keep attempting to create vampire musicals, starting with musical adaptations of Dracula. The year 1966 saw the first recorded musical-comedy version of Stoker’s called Dracula Revisited (Skal 2004: 294). Dracula: A Musical Nightmare with music by John Aschenbrenner and book and lyrics by Douglas Johnson premiered in 1978. Richard Ouzounian’s 1999 Dracula: A Chamber Musical was practically an opera, as opposed to Dracula, The Musical with music by Frank Willdhorn and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton is much closer to a traditional Broadway musical, produced only two years after Ouzounian’s. Douglas Yetter and Michael Hulett’s Dracula: The Musical in 2002 made three such musicals in 4 years.

An aborted attempt to adapt Nosferatu in the late sixties led to the international hit for Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Jim Steinman, the composer and producer of the song had originally written it for a Nosferatu musical:

with ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was ‘Vampires in Love’ because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they’re really like vampire lines. It’s all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love’s place in the dark. (quoted in Hernandez 2002)

The song was later used in Michael Kunze’s musical called Tanz Der Vampires/Dance of the Vampires , an adaptation of Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. Polanski wanted a comedy musical without much music; Steinman wanted a serious musical about vampires. The result was a strange experiment with uneven success. The musical was a critical and popular success in Europe, but its 2002 Broadway premiere with Michael Crawford, famous for his eponymous performance in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera , as the vampire was a flop, receiving terrible reviews and proved a failure at the American box office. Dracula, the Musical also attempted a Broadway production, proving to be a commercial and critical flop as well in 2004.

Also receiving uniformly negative views was Lestat (2005), a musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles , with a book by Linda Woolverton, music by Sir Elton John, and lyrics by Bernie Taupin. After premiering in San Francisco in 2005, the production transferred to Broadway in 2006, running for only thirty-nine performances, making for three failed vampire musicals in a row on Broadway in the first decade of the twenty-first century (“Lestat” 2006).

Two successful adaptations of the 1922 film Nosferatu have been presented onstage multiple times, both employing music. In 1995 Bernard J. Taylor composed Nosferatu: The Vampire, a musical and in 2004 Alva Henderson and Dana Gioia premiered Nosferatu: The Opera. Both adaptations present the vampire as a romantic, tragic figure, and thus the adaptation of Nosferatu in both cases is not merely transmedia or transcultural, but employs elements of the original narrative to create a story that does not always resemble the original very much (See Wetmore 2023).

Dracula has also been presented as a ballet with a variety of scores and choreographies. Houston Ballet staged Dracula in 1997, choreographed by Ben Stevenson to music by Franz Liszt, while the Royal Winnipeg Ballet staged their Dracula ballet to music by Gustav Mahler (Guiley 2005: 14–15), and The Northern Ballet Company of the United Kingdom toured with a ballet featuring original music by Philip Feeney, to name but three.

For over two hundred years vampires have stalked the stages of Europe, the United States, and the anglophone world, and their popularity has continued well into the twenty-first century. Vampires sing, dance, are silly and deadly serious, entertain, horrify, seduce, and serve as metaphors for everything audiences feel anxiety about. The key difference between film and theater is that theater is live, which adds an additional element of fear – when one sees a vampire on stage, one is in the same room, encountering the living dead live. It is on the stage that vampires continue to live among us as physical presences.

Cross-References