"I never drink wine"

Dracula of the Stage

1948 touring production

In a succinct three paragraphs, Clare Haworth-Maden in her overview of the film history of the character, Dracula: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Man, the Myth, and the Movies, gives us the genesis of Dracula on the stage:

“[Hamilton] Deane’s play Dracula, was first performed at the Grand Theatre, Derby in 1924.  By judiciously cutting many of the difficult elements contained in the book,  Deane avoided the mistakes made in Stoker’s dreadful adaptation.  The play was an instant success and it was still drawing crowds after its opening at the Little Theatre, London, on Valentine’s Day in 1927.  The young Raymond Huntley replaced the play’s original leading man, Edmund Blake, bringing considerable éclat to the role, with the result that, as the Evening News put it, Dracula has gone on drinking blood nightly.

The play had an important influence on our visualization of Dracula.  While Stoker’s Count possessed a ‘black moustache and pointed beard’ and dressed in black, Deane did away with these characteristics and instead gave Dracula the now familiar clean-shaven (green-hued) face, full evening dress, and swirling black opera cape.  It did not pass unnoticed that the revamped Dracula bore a striking resemblance to Deane himself, and it was suspected that, by basing Dracula upon himself, he had intended to play the starring role.

Dracula was a box-office smash and, in 1927, an American producer, Horace Liveright, recognizing its potential for the American market, bought the rights to the play and requested its revision.  Deane enlisted the services of the writer John L. Balderston and the resulting production opened at the Fulton Theater in New York later that year; in the lead an exotically-named Hungarian émigré, Bela Lugosi.”

The play ran for three years and then toured with Bela Lugosi, who played Los Angeles, which helped immeasurably in his getting to do the role in the film version.  The film, in fact, is more or less the play with the added opening sequence of Renfield going to Castle Dracula to make a real-estate deal and falling prey to the Count’s bite.  Written for the film was the famous line, “I never drink wine.”  The line became so repeated as a favorite way of imitating Lugosi’s voice, that it was added to a 1977 Broadway revival of the play starring Frank Langella.

The 1977 production was a big enough hit to inspire a remake movie and Langella got to go along for the ride, repeating history and the line, “I never drink wine.”  The revival was designed in an illustrative style by Edward Gorey, giving the melodrama a cartoon atmosphere, but Langella’s intense and seductive performance gave the entire production credibility.

A musical version in 2005, adapted by Christopher Hampton from the novel, was a messy flop, but it kept Lugosi’s line, “I never drink wine.”

Now Dracula returns in a new revival of the Hamilton Deane play set to open at the Little Shubert in December 2009.  I’m looking forward to it, for the play offers a true theatrical experience and good fun.  We are beyond bats wiggling on strings suspended from fishing poles, so it will be interesting to see how a modern production handles such things.  A few years ago I saw a regional production where it was handled simply and effectively by shadows.  The true test will be the casting of the Count.  The wrong person can ruin the production and the right person will seem, for the moment, irreplaceable.

In all productions, the character, Van Helsing, always holds up his hands to quiet the applause during the bows to give a few final words.  The play toured so often for so many years, that some audiences would recite the speech ala “Rocky Horror.”

“When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out and you are afraid to look behind the curtains and you dread to see a face appear at the window...why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all there are such things.”