The Broadway producers established a road company that toured the U.S. in 1978 and 1979, with Jean LeClerc as Dracula and George Martin as Van Helsing. [20] Jeremy Brett starred as Dracula in Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Chicago. [21] The U.S. revival also sparked a new production in London, where it opened on 13 September 1978 at the Shaftsbury Theatre. Terence Stamp took the title role, with Derek Godfrey as Van Helsing and Rosalind Ayres as Lucy. [22] Plot of the play [ edit ] Plot of original version by H. Deane [ edit ] Gorey remained irredeemably American. Despite the apparently English setting of many of his books, his only trip to Europe was to the Scottish islands, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and the Orkneys. He described not seeing the Loch Ness monster as the great tragedy of his life. But his international reputation steadily grew, as books were translated. In 1972, Amphigorey, an anthology of fifteen works, was published, followed, over the next few years, by Amphigorey Too, Amphigorey Also, and Amphigorey Again. Gorey’s long interest in book design led to his experiments with unconventional formats, including miniatures, pop-up books, postcards, and collections of moveable parts. At the start of the story, the Harkers are already married, Dracula is in England, and Lucy Westenra (renamed Westera in the play) is dead. The action of the play occurs primarily in the Harkers' home. To better match the actors available in Deane's company, he changed the character of Quincy Morris from a man to a woman. [36] Other characters, such as Dracula's vampire brides, were omitted. Deane also modernized the setting to the 1920s; Dracula arrives by airplane instead of a ship. [37] Changes between original version and revised version [ edit ] Waller, Gregory (2010) [1986]. The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07772-2. OCLC 952246731.

In 1927 the play was brought to Broadway by producer Horace Liveright, who hired John L. Balderston to revise the script for American audiences. In addition to radically compressing the plot, Balderston reduced the number of significant characters. Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray were combined into a single character, making John Seward Lucy's father and disposing of Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood. In Deane's original version, Quincey was changed to a woman to provide work in the play for more actresses. It should be noted,” Goreyana writes, “that all the sets for Dracula were hand painted by talented scene shop artists. Every cross hatched line on the walls, furniture, and floor had to be recreated to size by hand.” This is indeed impressive, and Gorey is probably right: the sets, which he also seemed to loathe, were probably more deserving of the Tony than the costumes. “The overall aesthetic,” says Rutigliano, “matches the period of the original Broadway run, the 1920s.” (The production won another Tony for Most Innovative Revival.) Scivally, Bruce (2015). Dracula FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Count from Transylvania. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 978-1-61713-636-8. OCLC 946707995.A voracious reader and collector of everything from obscure Victorian novels to translations of The Tale of Genji, from Symbolist poetry to books on napkin folding to the works of Carl Jung and George Gurjieff, and, apparently, everything in between, Gorey was also a connoisseur of popular television programs and obscure films. He had encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese cinema and the work of pioneers such as Louis Feuillade, the inventor of the serial thriller, whose silent films, such as the Fantomas series, clearly inform Gorey’s interiors and street scenes. He seems to have so thoroughly internalized an astonishingly wide range of sources that we can find allusions in his books to the works of Max Ernst, Paul Klee, police photographers, and 19th-century illustrators, along with flavors of Buster Keaton’s films, Lewis Carroll’s and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s books, Kabuki theater, and much, much more, including parodies of Agatha Christie’s mysteries and the pseudonymous French pornographer Pauline Réage’s The Story of O. Gorey claimed that he knew “a little bit about a lot of things,” a disclaimer that belied his extraordinarily well-furnished mind and his depth of knowledge of recherché subjects. The revised version of the play went on a national tour of the United States and replaced the original version in London. It influenced many subsequent adaptations, including the popular 1931 film adaptation starring Lugosi. A 1977 Broadway revival featured art designs by Edward Gorey and starred Frank Langella. It won the Tony Award for Best Revival and led to another movie version, also starring Langella.

Gorey attended Harvard University from 1946 to 1950, majoring in French literature, studying with John Ciardi, and rooming with the poet Frank O’Hara. Gorey’s earliest illustrations date from this period, when he also designed sets, directed, and wrote for the Poets Theater, along with O’Hara, John Ashbery, Alison Lurie, and Violet Lang, among others. His eccentrically dressed persona – long overcoats, tennis shoes, clanking jewelry, and eventually a luxuriant beard – was established at Harvard. In 1952, Gorey moved to New York to work in Doubleday’s new Anchor Books division, eventually designing more than fifty distinctive covers and achieving recognition for his illustrations. He worked for various publishing houses until turning freelance in the mid-1960s. He also began writing and illustrating his own books, publishing in 1953 the first of what would be more than a hundred small, enigmatic volumes: The Unstrung Harp, the illustrated story of the travails of a novelist. While Gorey claimed that he knew nothing about being a writer at the time, Graham Greene called The Unstrung Harp “the best novel ever written about a novelist and I ought to know.” Partly because of the introductions to the Public Television series Mystery!, created with the animator Derek Lamb and his team in 1980 and still in use, Gorey is best known to the wider public for his drawings. In his books, which chronicle a vaguely Edwardian world of patriarchs in ankle-length overcoats, mustachioed men in padded dressing gowns, wantons with nodding plumes, uniformed housemaids, and children in sailor suits and pinafores, images carry the ambiguous narratives as much as the text. His often relentlessly cross-hatched, inventively patterned pen and ink drawings can be obsessively detailed, full of small events that we must work hard to discover, or, as in the 1963 masterpiece The West Wing, which is devoid of text,miracles of suggestive economy. Yet Gorey always depicted himself as a writer, not as an artist. He described his books as “Victorian novels all scrunched up.” Manhattan, early 1970s. Photograph by Bill Cunningham. From The Unstrung Harp (1953) a b DVD Documentary The Road to Dracula (1999) and audio commentary by David J. Skal, Dracula: The Legacy Collection (2004), Universal Home Entertainment catalog # 24455 Murray, Paul (2022). "Hamilton Deane (1879–1958)". The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature (20 (Samhain)): 92 . Retrieved 29 September 2023.Deane made several other changes from Stoker's novel in his adaptation. He streamlined the story by omitting all scenes set outside of England, including the opening sequence of Jonathan Harker visiting Transylvania and the final sequence of Dracula being chased through Europe. [35] Jonathan Harker did help Dracula to buy property in London, but he did it without ever leaving England and met the Count only after he arrived in London and became the Harkers' neighbor.