Weekends are way too short these days. Daughter home from college – my parents and two younger brothers over on Saturday night and we had nice visit with wine, Giordano's pizza and Mom's lasagna and meatballs. We all got together to see my recently deceased older brother's widow, Bev, play viola in the pit at Cutting Hall theater in Palatine. Beverly and orchestra were wonderful!
The show was the Midwest premier of Dracula the Musical. The show was not half as bad as the title might suggest, though there were a few moments of badly suppressed giggling. There were several scenes where Dracula was wired to fly. You can always anticipate stage flight. The wires are conspicuously visible as the actors are generally tethered from the beginning of the scene, while you wait in hopeful, yet in a twisted half-hope of some equipment malfunction. Or perhaps that is just me.
I always imagine they might be hooked up wrong, the wire will snap, or the actor will be buffeted repeatedly against the set walls, while twisting around like a helpless piñata at a kid's party. I think this was actually part of the draw for the recent Spiderman Musical catastrophe. All went well, but it wasn't enough to just have Dracula airborne. I guess whoever produced this show figured, as long as we have the flying equipment rigged, at who knows what cost, we may as well have some of the other actors fly around too. So the margin of possible mishap exponentially increased with the, seemingly random, aerial exhibitions. By the time it was all over, the characters of Lucy, Mina and even the insect-loving Renfield all had some air-time.
So yes, there were some giggles during what was, presumably intended to be some very dramatic theater. But there was another moment in the show, where if I were to guess, I would say that nearly half of the audience was suppressing some serious outburst of laughter. This was a scene, early in the second act, where Lucy is more vampire than human after repeated necking with the blood-starved Count. She is chased off stage, by Van Helsing and posse, as she's about to feast on an innocent little girl. Suddenly there is an offstage scream and one of the vampire hunters walks back on stage while clutching, by long blonde locks, the severed head of Lucy.
It makes me wonder if theater has really gotten so bad that dramatic moments evoke such fits of ambiguous laughter, or is it possibly a very clever part on the writers/producers to make the show much more fun, by giving the audience the illusion that we are being irreverent. Perhaps we are falling as much under their spell as Dracula had over his immortal minions?
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