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Dance With Me, Harker

nytheatre.com review by Eric Winick
August 15, 2005

I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and now, having seen Wallis Knot’s Dance With Me, Harker, I wish I had. There’s clearly a compelling story here—years of adaptations and spin-offs prove this, to a fault—so why shouldn’t there be an experimental, disco-inflected, movement-based version? This is the Fringe Festival, after all. A show featuring nudity, Grand Guignol horror, and writhing, corset-clad beauties should fit right in to this annual pageant of debauchery.Adapter-designer-director-choreographer Eileen Connolly has fashioned her Dracula as a series of viewpoints on the main storyline, much like Stoker’s novel (I’m told). Harker follows our title character (Daniel Wolfe) on a globe-trotting journey from Transylvania, where he first encounters Dracula (Richard Omar), to London, where the night stalker continues his reign of terror, and back to Transylvania, where Harker, along with Drs. Seward and Van Helsing (Jyota Bertrand and Kathy Hendrickson), attempts to finish off the Count once and for all. Each character relates, in time, his/her own part of the story, and, eventually, busts a move on the dance floor. Though the action is presented, for the most part, on a bare stage, Connolly illustrates the tale with some breathtaking stage pictures, many of them involving plastic sheeting.There’s value, of course, in reinventing a classic, and in using the medium of theater to explore its visual, sonic, and kinetic possibilities. Connolly has hit on a novel approach to Stoker’s material, but one wishes it had been a bit clearer for those not intimate with the subject material. The use of video, song, and a plethora of foreign languages seem designed to lend Harker a timeless, international flavor, but they only wind up diluting the main story. At one point, a castigating nun hands audience members a flyer relating the true history of Transylvania and Dracula. I’m not sure when we were meant to read this information, given that we were sitting in the dark, but then, given Connolly’s kitchen sink approach, why not hand the audience a dense, wordy historical handout?And then there’s the question which is destined to plague every Stoker adaptation, be it on Broadway or off-off-off: how much of this is intended to be funny? Despite the preponderance of cleavage, impassioned glances, funk-rock score, and overall cheesy-sleazy air (personified by Omar’s swaggering Count), there’s a solemnity to the proceedings that belies the show’s Rocky Horror-esque vibe. The cast earns high marks for committing fully to the approach, and Connolly is to be credited for her thoroughly modern spin, but ultimately, as enjoyable as it is to watch scantily-clad vampire brides sashay, vogue, and pose, an over-reliance on gimmickry stabs this Dracula straight through its rapidly beating heart.