Your Daily Dracula – Golan Yosef, Dracula, l’Amour Plus Fort Que la Mort (2011)
I imagine this must have been a great night out at the theatre. This is the version made for cinema screenings the way West End stage hits are sometimes put on in cinemas – it’s slightly remote from the action, though well above cam-cordered school play standards (and I’ve seen a lot of Draculas like that). Conceived and directed by Kamel Ouali, it’s as much circus as ballet or musical – with tumblers, dancers, clowns, a one-legged dancer/acrobat, a film insert in 3D (a challenge for the film folk, who show flat images and the audience wearing glasses – the panto I saw last year did the same thing), shadowpuppetry Vlad prologue a la Coppola, and a couple of I’ve-not-seen-this-before frills (literally frills – this Dracula has gills on his chest and Godzilla spines down his back complete with little dorsal apendage).
Dracula is dancer Golan Yosef, which means three minions (Ginie Line, Lola Ces, Gregory Dick) get to narrate, do dialogue, make jokes and leer/pose Rocky Horror-style – I wondered if they were supposed to be alternate incarnations of the Count. Lucy (Anais Delva) gets the hit song ‘1-2-3’ (about her marriage proposals?) and has more dramatic weight than Mina (Nathalie Fauquette) while Van Helsing (Aymeric Ribot) is a heavy metal crusader, Jonathan (Julien Loko) barely holds the plot together and Dr Seward (Laurent Levy) does the acting. It has a whole chorus to play the brides, asylum inmates (no Renfield, though), Transylvanians, hangers-on, novelty turns and nude statues.
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