Seattle to Remain Famous for Coffee and Rain
Thanksgiving Pairing Suggestion: Dessert Isn't Just a Meal
Eight Things A Seattle Sports Fan Can Be Thankful For
Seattlest Pix 09Nov25
Can't Miss It: Thanksgiving Eve
Halloween is such a fantastic mix of death, decay, kitsch, and morbid Catholic ritual that there is just no topping it as far as holidays go. Of course it does present some problems. Often at Halloween what would appear to be limitless possibility in the end boils down to options that are severely limited by your own laziness and the picked-over racks at the costume store, and this is particularly true for the girls. What to be on Halloween: A Sexy Devil? A Sexy Cat? A Sexy Nurse? A Sexy Devil Cat? And the same holds true when a theatre company is attempting to stage a production that takes advantage of the Halloween theme. The pool of appropriate stageplays would seem to be vast, and yet new theatre company Balagan's choice of "Transylvanian Clockworks" is the theatrical equivalent of the Sexy Devil Cat Nurse. Did they start shopping for this on October 30th?
Balagan is performing "Transylvanian Clockworks" at the Capitol Hill Arts Center Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays until October 21st, and if you can stomach the text there's a lot to recommend it. There're hot chicks in breast-augmenting corsets. There's the hot bald guy from "Hellhound on My Trail" as Dracula. There's Richard Clairmont doing a decent Van Helsing. There's an exciting texture of sex and death, and there's ninety percent of a very straightforward -but well visualized- Dracula play.
Since it's impossible to discuss this play without blowing the gimmick, you should consider not reading the rest of this post if you plan to go see it.
"Transylvanian Clockworks" is ninety percent of a straightforward Dracula play containing markedly sexier women and a slightly more deranged Van Helsing, but eighty-nine percent of the way through we were thinking that it's pretty hot and all, but isn't it just a straightforward Dracula play? Shit, at one point Seattlest was ready to jump up on stage to stake a bitch in the interest of saving her eternal soul and getting on with our life. Then, the twist ending. Dracula isn't Dracula after all. He's just a Count from Transylvania with a penchant for wolves and the dark. It turns out he builds clockwork "universes" which he ships around the world in wooden boxes and he just wants to be loved. He's awkward. His word is "unaccustomed." He's unaccustomed, but other than that he's just an oddball pursuing a geeky but harmless and maybe even enlightened hobby. Completely innocent! Van Helsing is the evil one who degenerates into a hottie spiking monster.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. If it looks like Dracula, smells like Dracula, and tastes like Dracula, it is Dracula and if you want to establish the danger of that conclusion, you're going to have to work a little harder than this. In the hands of a more careful playwright it might work, but Don Nigro completely fails by continuously smashing the audience over the head with the fact that they're watching Dracula and not even leaving a door to the conclusion that it's not Dracula unlocked. If you really work hard and make a lot of allowances, you can get at Nigro's concept that in a tempestuous environment of fear and suspicion (Jack the Ripper's name is dropped a few times), people can be made to believe the worst of an oddball. That's not really in the script, though. It's just cheated in there by an obvious last-minute twist ending that Nigro could have picked up off the rack of the party store on the night before Halloween.
Best of luck to Balagan Theatre Company in their future endeavors, though. Good actors, costumes, set, etc., and we appreciate their willingness to stage a lightly-used play. Unfortunately, the one they chose this time is lightly-used for a reason.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
i want to become a VAMPIRE how can i become? i am a girl wanted to be a sexyvampire. Afterall is it possible i want to become a witch