Escape from Castle Dracula

Dracula: A Love Story at Casa Loma Thursday night was a mixed experience.

On a technical level the play was kind of a mess. The production staff and their equipment was far from invisible during the play, and the dialogue wasn't great. Dracula set the tone for the acting early on when I heard his cartoon-y east European accent. When he introduced himself to Jonathan Harker, he is proceeded, (or followed) by a blast of mist from a fog machine easily visible on the floor. They couldn't even put it just behind the corner where he emerged from. Sometimes it was a little hard to hear the dialogue sometimes because the venue was so voluminous and sometimes characters were running around. A lot of the characters were also very thin and poorly developed.



The music and songs likewise didn't really seem to add much because this play didn't attempt to be a musical with lots of memorable performances. Instead we just sort of got some singing just dropped in but seemingly only in the first half. So the pipes were kind of wasted. The organ/piano music was also not very melodic or memorable...or used consistently. A lot in this play just seemed thrown together.

The events of the story also proceeded at a strange pace. There was a cross between correspondences/monologues and other scenes, (A neat idea) but I don't think the play really took advantage of the use of the perspectives. Instead you might get a scene where a person's diary flat out provides exposition about Dracula which they have come to by seemingly magical means. Some scenes were good or creepy, yet didn't seem to have any reason to exist.
The play was subtitled as An Unrequited Love Story, but that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything as the story was more a black and white conflict rather than a dramatic horror.

The show was at its best when it was being campy, funny, or melodramatic. There were a couple of funny moments: The doctor seemed to think he could impress Lucy by talking about male genitalia, and Arthur the 'gentleman' seemed pretty much a weenie. (His suit seemed too big for him which would make for a good metaphor if I wasn't sure that it was probably just a lack of a better fit)

Pictured: More costume difficulties

Renfield was this fat, happy, lunatic and lit up the show whenever he was on the scene; Dracula takes a zombie-like Mina to a vampire ball where Dr. Van Helsing insinuates himself into the crowd by pretending to dance along; There's a fake decapitated head, and the musical coordinator is dressed as the Phantom of the Opera.

Sometimes between scenes we were just directed to the next spot, but other times we would be compelled to follow either a precocious paperboy, or a demented Van Helsing, or lured off by Renfield running away from an orderly, (Maybe not a good idea to get a crowd of people to run down back corridors and thin steps though) and you'd see somebody pretending to be a corpse in one room as you passed by.




Casa Loma was also a pretty neat place. There was a large open entry hall overlooked by the master bedroom's balcony, a conservatory(?) with white floors and big windows and a dome roof. The library was the old style with glass cases for books and a lot of space. The basement doesn't really look period though. Unlike The Turn of the Screw we didn't have so much period lighting and the rooms were generally bigger. Also, that play was much more confined to a residence than this play was, which probably made it work better even though a period house downtown would not seem more impressive than a castle on a forested hill. Still, the Casa was a nice place and its usually pretty great when you have an interest set and get to move around in it. Nice view from the hill too.

So the play was pretty fun and it was a pleasure to spend the evening this way, but not quite technically one of the better plays I've seen.