European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - September 10, 1978, Darmstadt, Hesse Imbibe my my Mem Bumm Mhz bomb pm my a i Doil Magazine going Batty Over Dracula in trouble in Broadway s the pass on of Draco a now playing in London. Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi starred in Dracula in 1931. Scholars say this was the real Dracula a romanian Prince named Vlad Tepes born in 1431. By Gregory Jensen United press International wolves howled on London s Shaftesbury Avenue the other night Thunder crashed from a cloudless sky and the sound of bats fluttered Over the Box office As Dracula came Back to his Hometown. The passion of Dracula a joyous Load of Ripe american Corn is the first of a flock of vampires flooding into de senseless London. The Broadway Dracula arrives soon there s a musical extravaganza on the Dracula theme just out of town plus a new historical Survey of the Vampire and a Yorkshire Jet Carver Selling a Nice line of Dracula jew Elry in Coal Black Jet. It seems the blood drinking undead Are coming Home to Roost. For this is where the Dracula clan began. Count Dracula was from Transylvania historically he stems from a 15th-Century Balkan Prince infamous not for drinking blood but for impaling his enemies on spikes. But Bram Stoker the Man who really made Dracula immortal lived in London s Chelsea District when he wrote the Book which started the whole Dracula Industry. Bram for Abraham Stoker was a character Odd enough to step from one of his own seven novels. As a child he was so crippled that he did t walk until he was 7. Yet at Dublin University he was an outstanding athlete and soccer player. He was a civil servant for 10 years then abruptly latched onto the great actor sir Henry Irving. For 27 years until Irving s death he was the actor s manager and right hand even accompanying him on his american Tours. Stoker was 40 when Dracula appeared in 1897. He wrote Only one other novel on the theme Dracula s guests which was t published until two years after his death in 1912. He never knew what he had started. There have been More than 50 Dracula movies not to mention plays like the current wave with another coming soon. Lord Laurence Olivier no less has been cast in a movie version of the Broadway Dracula which starts shooting in London this fall. Stoker did t entirely invent Dracula. The Vam Pire myth has been around since the ancient greeks and in 1821 there were eight Vampire plays running simultaneously in Paris. Stoker took the old legend of Vlad the impaler and grafted the Vampire theme onto Bob Hall and David Richmond have done something similar in the passion of Dracula. They be adapted Stoker s tale to stress every hoary cliche larded with lines Queen Victoria herself might have found could have had me any time reclaims the stiff upper lip British lord bloody handed after driving a wooden stake through the heart of his own True Vampire love but she could not have it s an evening of flapping bats a professor with a funny accent howling dogs and pure but deranged he Roine. Throats Are ripped out crosses and garlic flourish. And every time doors Fly open onto a Crystal Clear night fog comes flooding in. Off Broadway this was Small scale hokum. In London All the stops Are out top flight director Clifford Williams a cast of Royal Shakespeare com Pany and National theater actors an amazing set and Broadway s George Chakiris As the count in swirling velvet capes and fangs for the memory. They play the ridiculous melodrama As straight As a Shakespeare tragedy and the result is funnier than any Send up would be. If the rest of the Dracula mania inva Sion is As pleasant As this London has Little to fear. Sunday september 10, 1978 the stars and stripes Page 9
