Tag: Dracula

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Ballet Memphis’ Dracula Returns to the Stage

Ballet Memphis’ Dracula (Photo: Ziggy Mack)

Ready your garlic, sharpen your stakes, and replenish your Holy Water stock because Ballet Memphis is kicking off its 38th season with Dracula this weekend.

Inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel, Ballet Memphis’ performance features original choreography by artistic director Steven McMahon, with original music, set design by Beowulf Borritt and Nate Bertone, and costumes by Hogan McLaughlin. This will be the second time Dracula hits the stage with Ballet Memphis, having premiered back in 2022 to great fanfare.

“The community response to it last time was just fantastic,” says Ballet Memphis president and CEO Gretchen Wollert McLennon. “We thought we’d be bringing it back in three or four years, but we had such a great community response to it that we brought it back only two years later.”

Dracula, it turns out, translates perfectly to ballet. “You take a story like Dracula, which already has so much emotion behind it,” Wollert McLennon says, “and you just can imagine that a story that has that much depth to it, the opportunity then to explore it physically as artists and dancers really just takes that story to another level, right? So we’re feeling it. We’re seeing it in ways that allow Bram Stoker’s classic story to really come alive.

“Our sets and costumes are intentionally very simple so that the performance really immerses you in the thrill of the story of Dracula, and the dread and expectation that the story builds is really resonant in our work.”

The production is less than two hours, and attendees are encouraged to vamp it up by wearing a Halloween costume. The performance is not recommended for guests 12 and under.

Up next on Ballet Memphis’ schedule, though, is The Nutcracker, a 40-year, family-friendly tradition for the company. “Everyone loves The Nutcracker,” says Wollert McLennon, “and we love bringing it to the community because it brings families together. Sometimes the only time people experience dance in their lives is that moment when their parents took them, their grandmother took them, their neighbor took them. And so we know how important it is to everyone at this time of year; it’s really a centerpiece of everyone’s holiday tradition.”

Last year, Ballet Memphis introduced new costumes and set designs, plus a few new Memphis elements to the story, and the company will continue with these changes this December.   

In February, Ballet Memphis will perform its Winter Mix, which will be a mixed repertory of contemporary and balletic dance, and in April comes the company’s Angels in the Architecture, a double bill of works by master choreographers and composers. For more information on the upcoming season and to purchase tickets, visit balletmemphis.org.  

Dracula, Orpheum Theatre, 203 S. Main, Friday-Saturday, October 25-26, 7:30 p.m. | Sunday, October 28, 2 p.m., $16-$91.

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Film Features Film/TV

Renfield

Nicholas Hoult in Renfield (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Hear me out: Nicolas Cage deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dracula in Renfield. 

I know, I know. It’s Nic Cage, dude from Con Air and Kick Ass and a couple dozen direct-to-video cash-in schlockfests. And he’s playing Dracula in a cornball B picture directed by a former Robot Chicken animator named Chris McKay. But actors have gotten Oscar nominations for lazier performances in much crappier movies. And there’s nothing lazy about Cage’s Dracula — if anything, he put way too much effort into it! But as Penn Jillette said, “The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.” 

It’s appropriate that, when Renfield finally got to be the star of his own story, Dracula steals the show. R. M. Renfield appears in Bram Stoker’s novel as a patient in an insane asylum who worships Dracula. He eats live bugs to gain their life force, like a vampire drinks the blood of living victims. (His doctor describes him as “zoophagous maniac,” proving they just don’t diagnose ’em like they used to.) Dracula gets Renfield to do his bidding by dangling the prospect of immortality, but never actually helping his thrall go full vamp. 

Nicholas Hoult stars as Renfield, who we first meet in a group therapy session for people in codependent relationships. He recognizes the stories of abuse he hears from his own life with the big D. He and his bloodsucking boss have fallen into a pattern of dysfunction. They move to a new place, start to hunt in earnest, but Dracula gets too greedy, and the locals are tipped off. Then a vampire hunter, usually from the Catholic Church, arrives, and there’s a big fight in which Dracula is almost killed. Renfield has to pick up the pieces, move to a new town — this time, it’s New Orleans — and start collecting victims while Dracula convalesces.

Nicolas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

With the encouragement of therapist Mark, Renfield takes the bold steps of getting his own apartment and wearing clothes that are not black. He still has to search for victims to feed his personal monster, but he decides to prioritize the abusers who are making his new friends’ lives hell. This leads to a confrontation with gangsters inside a Mardi Gras float warehouse where Tedward (Ben Schwartz), the scion of the Lobos crime family, sees Renfield’s magical murder talents first hand. When a beat cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) investigates the bloody scene, she sees that the clues lead back to Renfield and Dracula, embroiling her in an escalating conflict between the drug cartel and the dark lord. 

Hoult has plenty of choices for inspiration, from Klaus Kinski to Tom Waits. He has the haircut and bug eyes of Dwight Frye, who originated the character in 1931. But Hoult seems to be channeling Harvey Gullén’s Guillermo from What We Do In The Shadows. When he and Cage share the screen, sparks fly. 

Cage is not a madman. He is an extraordinarily talented screen actor in the tradition of James Cagney. His approach to Dracula is downright scholarly, mixing bits of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman with his own personae.  His every gesture is perfectly calibrated for the moment. If you’re used to seeing a bored Cage vamp in roles that are frankly beneath him, watching him sink his teeth into Dracula will be a revelation.

Unfortunately, this movie is also beneath him. Awkwafina, bless her heart, is left completely at sea in a role that shouldn’t have existed. The whole crime family vs. corrupt cops subplot is stupid, disjointed, and unnecessary. It seemingly exists only to provide Marvel-esque moments of fight choreography — except the fights are the most boring part of the MCU movies! “Renfield tries to save his therapy group from an angry Dracula” is plenty of plot for a film where the real meat is a Nic v. Nicolas thespian cage match. Every second they’re not on screen is wasted. 

Renfield is a must for Cage watchers, which are legion, and vampire obsessives who walk the night but could use a good chuckle to break up the gothic ennui. Others will find it a pleasant but ultimately bloodless diversion. 

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Film Features Film/TV

New in Theaters: Venom, Sopranos, and Hints of Halloween

Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock/Venom in Columbia Pictures' VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE.

It’s a busy start to a new month in Memphis movie theaters. The biggest money film opening this Friday is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the $110 million sequel to the 2018 Spider-Man spinoff. It stars Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson as hosts of feuding alien symbiots dead set on, you guessed it, carnage. It’s directed by legendary actor Andy Serkis, who as Gollum, Snoke, and Caesar, is the greatest motion capture artist of all time.

Speaking of becoming a monster, The Sopranos has been having a bit of a comeback lately. Did HBO’s suburban gangster show ever really go away at all? Now comes The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by series creator David Chase. Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, plays his father’s most famous character, Tony Soprano, as he learns the life lessons that will make a mobster.

Opening exclusively at Studio on the Square is a film that has already made a bit of history. Earlier this year, director Julia Ducournau became only the second woman in history to win the Palme d’Or, the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival—and the first woman to win it outright. (Jane Campion’s The Piano tied with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine in 1993.) I loved Ducournau’s 2016 psychological cannibal horror Raw, and by all accounts, Titane is indescribably bonkers. So, I’m there.

It’s October 1, and that means it’s time to hang the cobwebs, put out the pumpkins, and watch horror movies. The Addams Family 2 is not exactly horror, but it’s certainly Halloween-y. The second CGI incarnation of the beloved vamp fam from TV history features an all-star voice cast that will probably be your only opportunity to see Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Snoop Dogg and Bette Midler in the same credits.

While the chilling and macabre were present in cinema from the beginning, and films such as Häxan and The Phantom Carriage were hits in the 1920s, the era of the horror film began in 1931 with a pair of films that will screen as a double feature on Saturday at the Malco Paradiso and the Collierville Cinema Grill. The first was Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s vampire count. The film, which turned Universal Pictures into a horror machine, is full of iconic scenes like this one.

A few months later, director James Whale one-upped the children of the night by adapting Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. To my eyes, Dracula is creaky and Victorian, while Frankenstein still crackles with life. The slow reveal of the monster has been often imitated but never equaled.

If that’s a little too intense, you can ease into October with a twentieth anniversary screening of the film that brought anime into the mainstream in North America, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away at various Malcos.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis

This is not a musical. No ships hit icebergs. Nobody’s king of the world.

Was that a wolf mask? A bat mask? A rat mask? Or a fly? Was it rubber?

Forgive.

Thoughts have been scattered since I sampled Sunday’s matinee performance of Dracula at Theatre Memphis. To combat the glamour, I’ve given myself a mental challenge. I’ll make it through this entire review without using the word “sucks.” Even if it kills me.

Theatre Memphis’ Dracula is all blood, no guts. Still, the lush production gets at least one key thing exactly right. A little well-placed magic goes a long way. Levitation illusions are also a fun way to evoke that steamy point on the temporal map where nineteenth-century spiritualism crashes headlong into the modern age — a time when psychoanalysts unlocked mysteries of the mind while performers like Harry Keller toured the globe performing self-decapitations and floating head tricks.

William McNulty’s script leans into the vampire story’s potential for Jacobean-style splatter and grand-guignol illusion. In doing so, it also opens a portal to the camp dimension. Like the hapless victims of a cruel prank, the cast and crew walk right through.

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis

We’ve seen so many versions of Dracula since 1897, the year theater manager and pulp author Bram Stoker borrowed the memory of Vlad the Impaler, a brutal prince who butchered Turks and Bulgarians for “the preservation of Christianity,” and transformed him into the shape-shifting prince of darkness we know today. We’ve seen demonic Draculas, sleazy Draculas, sexy Draculas, silly Draculas, groovy Draculas, disco Draculas, and outright campy Draculas. We’ve seen porny Draculas, super–villain Draculas and kid–friendly Draculas who sell breakfast cereal and teach us to count. The fatal flaw with this latest incarnation is that nobody seems to have made a hard, clear decision as to what kind of Dracula this Dracula wants to be.

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis (6)

Brian Everson’s a trooper but hopelessly miscast in the title role. He’s a go-to actor for light comic leads. Adjectives that come to mind include “able,” “clever,” and “nonthreatening.” Outfitted with a long black wig, and dark, impaleresque facial hair, his Dracula looks like it might have wandered away from the set of  What We Do in the Shadows. He’s adopted a broad Draculonian accent and acts in bold strokes more suitable to musical comedy or farce. The pomp and  effort makes this blood-craving ghoul funny when he should be scary and the wolf mask thing with “Safety Dance” hair doesn’t help a bit.

Wolf-bat?  Flying rat-wolf?

Everson’s got a sound supporting cast. Andrew Chandler is especially enjoyable as the bug and rat munching Renfield. Jason M. Spitzer’s an attentive director, notable for the work he did to inject a much-needed dash of horror into Theatre Memphis’ long-running holiday staple, A Christmas Carol. His Dracula is thoroughly rendered but never scary enough to qualify as horror, mysterious enough to function as suspense, or funny enough to be a comedy. It’s not tricked out enough to be a magic show nor is there quite enough mayhem to call it theater of blood.

Memphis’ namesake playhouse seems to be taking some risks these days but the best adjective I can think of for this show is “safe.” As noted above, Dracula can be a lot of different things. But safe isn’t one of them.

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis (4)

As the well-known horror classic unfolded in front of me, my mind wandered far and wide. At one point I started trying to think of all the fun spook season shows Theatre Memphis might have produced instead of this Dickensian Dracula. They’ve done such a fine job with monster musicals like Young Frankenstein and The Addams Family. “So why wasn’t I watching the American Psycho musical?,” I wondered, not giving a fig if the flopped Brett Easton Ellis adaptation was ever a good idea or not. All that brutality, misogyny, and 1980’s-style greed would at least be in line with contemporary anxieties.  For fresher takes on the old vampire story there’s Little One, Cuddles, and Let The Right One In. There’s an Evil Dead musical and if that’s too far out, Theatre Memphis is more than equipped to explore the psychological terror in dramas like Frozen or The Pillowman.

via GIPHY

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis (2)

With this list of things that might have been, I’ve got nothing left to say. So here we are at the end of the review and I didn’t use “sucks” once. Or even bites. To borrow from Deadpool, that would have been lazy writing. Besides Theater Memphis’ Dracula doesn’t suck or bite. But it doesn’t thrill or chill either. That blows.

Dracula’s Got No Bite at Theatre Memphis (5)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

FILM TITLE: Dracula (1931)

ELAPSED TIME: 85 minutes (plus or minus a few in the middle)

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? The Dracula was killed!

I’m not a fan of horror, but I find it hard to equate the mistily lit estates and silken gowns of Depression-era Dracula with “horror”. This movie is a horror as Miss Mina, Dracula’s would-be bride, pronounces it: “This horror,” she says, lifting pearly hand to porcelain face. The music swells. When Dracula’s three flapper brides leave their “earth boxes” and float eerily towards their caped husband, gruesome and Gatsby-ian, an undead convalescence seems almost attractive. I’m reminded of the essayist Leslie Jamison’s judgement that, in art, “The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars…. Violence turns them celestial.”

I watched an anniversary edition of this movie that was paired with a newish Philip Glass score, something I didn’t realize until halfway through the movie. I thought, “Wow, the 1931 version of Dracula sure does strike a lot of the same emotional notes as The Hours.” Glass’s score is quietly urgent and romantic, designed, as he put it, to fit the “libraries and drawing rooms and gardens” of the classic film. It lights on the mournful and disregards suspense. Even the freakiest of monologues (“Rats. Rats! Thousands! Millions of them! All red blood! All these will I give you if you will obey me!”), paired with Glass’s composition, feels more sad than scary.

Bela Lugosi is unlike anyone before or since as the sharp-toothed aristocrat from Eastern Europe. I found myself wondering whether my great grandfather’s generation actually had more corporeal stillness, or if Dracula’s unearthly composure was simply another facet of Lugosi’s mastery. His foil, the crazy-eyed Renfield (Dwight Frye), is as seething as Dracula is sadistically controlled. And then you have the strong-willed Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), a doctor whose strength of character allows him to embrace certain dark truths. “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime,” says Dracula, “You are a wise man, Van Helsing”

An uncle of mine, a fan of the vampiric, once made a point that has stayed with me— that Dracula is a sort of inverted Christ-figure. Instead of giving you his blood to drink, thus allowing for salvation, he drinks yours and keeps you away from heaven forever. So it is fair to see these characters eventual defiance of the Dracula as a heavenly allegory, as well as to accept the premise that to get to the light, you have to accept that real darkness exists. It’s an idea as transcendent as it is terrifying, which is probably why I made it through all 85 minutes of this one. I may not be as stolid with Dracula’s more recent incarnations. 

Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

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Blood Brother

CREDIT: Guillermo Umbria

Nothing says Halloween like a tall, fanged man in a long black cape. And costumed revelers who want to extend their spook-day celebrations into November may wish to check out the closing weekend of Hattiloo Theatre’s solid production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Playwright Steven Dietz made a name for himself with the absurdist AIDS play Lonely Planet and earned critical plaudits for God’s Country, a hard-hitting look at hate crimes in America. His take on gothic literature’s most famous bloodsucker is far less serious than previous endeavors, mixing humor and horror in equal measures. Dietz’s Dracula has less to to do with blood and bats than it does with seduction and a community’s response to the sudden, scientifically inexplicable darkness that overtakes it.

Landry Kamdem Kamdem, a native of Cameroon and postdoctoral research scientist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, plays the wicked count with smoldering intensity. His lyrical accent may betray the actor’s non-Transylvanian roots, but it adds plenty to the play’s exotic and occasionally erotic mystique.

Veteran actor Tony Anderson, known for powerful performances in shows like Master Harold… and the Boys and My Children! My Africa!, takes on the role of doctor-turned-vampire-hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Reginald Brown, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Memphis and co-founder of Newark, New Jersey’s Ensemble Theater Company, directs.

“Dracula” at Hattiloo Theatre through Sunday, November 4th. Tickets at the door are $18 for adults, $15 for students and seniors.