{"id":378,"date":"2023-12-10T17:42:58","date_gmt":"2023-12-10T14:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/?p=378"},"modified":"2023-12-10T17:44:05","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T14:14:05","slug":"his-dracula-project-creating-a-funny-vampire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/his-dracula-project-creating-a-funny-vampire\/","title":{"rendered":"His \u2018Dracula\u2019 Project: Creating a Funny Vampire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Theater Online: <\/a>In the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where \u201cDracula, a Comedy of Terrors\u201d is playing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: \u201cLoved the performance. You might need a transfusion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prop won\u2019t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, \u201cthe state below Transylvania,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have given vampires to the country \u2014 why not get involved in commerce?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor \u201cso the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He added: \u201cThis is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours \u2014 asking, \u2018Who is Bram Stoker?\u2019 Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also enjoys making Dracula funny. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that\u2019s been around for 127 years,\u201d he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called \u201cDracula, a Comedy of Terrors,\u201d at New World Stages, \u201ca gender-bending play\u201d that \u201cpays no mind to the \u2018terrors\u2019 part of its title.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker\u2019s \u201cclaim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,\u201d he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIrving had extravagant tastes,\u201d he said, and Bram, who had a master\u2019s in math, \u201chad to hold him back while he crunched the numbers\u201d at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,\u201d Dacre Stoker said, \u201cso Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.\u201d Others have written about Bram Stoker\u2019s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men\u2019s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been \u201clike this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.\u201d He used material he found for \u201cDracul,\u201d a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That book followed a 2009 novel, \u201cDracula: The Un-Dead,\u201d which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker goes to a comic version of \u201cDracula\u201d that is appearing Off Broadway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,17],"tags":[134,75,133],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-international-theater","tag-bram-stoker","tag-broadway","tag-dracula"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theateronline.ir\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}