In
honor of Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday today (thank you,
Google) I am going to tell you about the ballet of Dracula that I recently saw
at the Kennedy Center. It was melodramatic, tremendously creepy, and full of
fake blood. Blood!
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say the scariest things in the ballet were Van Helsing’s eyebrows. I was convinced they were going to crawl off the stage and come for me, just before exiting the Kennedy Center and going on to wreak havoc in the Capital. They pulled focus, is what I’m saying. I wish I could find a photo because they were truly something to behold.
This ballet was danced by the Washington Ballet. About a week
before that I saw a Russian company dance Cinderella and they used minimal sets
and simple costumes, probably to set off the exquisite dancing. Dracula was the
complete opposite for sets and costumes. The dancing was wonderful, but it was
accompanied by crumbling castles, dank crypts, and dry ice fog rolling across
the stage. It’s Dracula; it has to be at least a little campy.
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| Dracula catches his first glimpse of Mina in Jonathan Harker's photo. |
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| Jonathan and the three vampires who try to devour him. Gah! |
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| Jonathan's nightmare about his wedding to Mina. |
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| Dracula turns Lucy into a creature of the night. |
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| Renfield is sacrificed as vampire Lucy and Mina look on. |
It was supremely creepy. There were wolves lurking in the
shadows, bloody corpses crawling out of coffins (which gave me fear flashbacks
to when I first watched the Thriller video at age 6), and people were getting bitten all over the place. The neck biting really creeps me out.
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| Tell me this does not creep you out! |
In one scene, when Dracula is trying to turn Mina into a
vampire, he takes his fingernail and slices open his bare chest so she can
drink his blood. It looked incredibly real from the first row and I
concentrated on breathing deeply and not vomiting. Vomiting at the Kennedy Center is just not the thing.
Super creepy,
super fun. I like to think Mr. Stoker would have been pleased.
2 comments:
How did you make it through all that? I love the ballet, but what you described in the last paragraph would have had me running, or at least hiding under my jacket.
Yeah, it was way gross. But it was what I'd signed up for.
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