Rhodes, Gary Don (2006) [1997]. Lugosi: His Life in Films, on Stage, and in the Hearts of Horror Lovers. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-2765-5. OCLC 809669876. Here at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, we not only have a copy of Scribner’s publication of Dracula: A Toy Theatre, but two copies of the Pomegranate publication as well. The Era gave a positive review to the original production in 1924, calling it "very thrilling". [41] The paper also gave a positive review to the Little Theatre production in London, praising its "breathtaking excitements" and comparing it favorably to the Grand Guignol shows in Paris. [42] Frank Langella, star of the 1977 Broadway revival, reprised the role of Count Dracula in the 1979 film version directed by John Badham. 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.

Eder, Richard (21 October 1977). "Theater: An Elegant, Bloodless Dracula". The New York Times. p.C3. 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. The set and costumes were so enthralling that the play soon became known as “Edward Gorey’s production of Dracula,” instead of being fully credited to the director. Gorey’s designs were nominated for Tony Awards, and the production received a Tony in 1977 for the best revival of a play. The play was first staged in 1973, and for years, Gorey says, each time a theater company decided to put it on, he was called up to consult. He dutifully turned up each time, scowling glumly and wondering why. When it finally hit Broadway, he saw two-thirds of a rehearsal and left “jaundiced.” The final product left an even more sour taste. It was, he says, “absurd,” but very lucrative. As for the Tony, he says ironically, the award turned out to be “the cross I had to bear,” an embarrassing accolade for costumes he deemed unworthy of the honor. 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.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 He switched the names of female characters, now Mina character was called Lucy Seward, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward and fiancee of Jonathan Harker (named now John Harker). [38] To stage the production, Deane was required to submit the completed script to the Lord Chamberlain for a license under the Theatres Act of 1843. The play was censored to limit violence – for example, the count's death could not be shown to the audience – but was approved on 15 May 1924. [8]

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. If you want to see them in person, you can swing on by to the Special Collections on the third floor of the Main Library. Otherwise, on October 28 th, 11:00am – 3:00pm, we will be hosting a Halloween Pop-Up Exhibit on the first floor of the Main Library, where the complete construction of Dracula: A Toy Theatre will be the star of the exhibit, along with a showcase of some of our spookiest comics and fanzines. During the original Broadway run, members of the Dracula cast presented an adaptation of the play on 30 March 1928, on the short-lived NBC Radio series Stardom of Broadway. Lugosi, Van Sloan, Peterson, Neill, and Jukes performed on the 30-minute program. [44] Films [ edit ] Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation Directed by Ira Hards with scenic design by Joseph A. Physioc, Dracula opened on 5 October 1927 at the Fulton Theatre in New York City. It closed on 19 May 1928 after 261 performances. The Broadway production starred Bela Lugosi in his first major English-speaking role; Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing; and Dorothy Peterson as Lucy Seward. [12] Raymond Huntley, who had performed the role of Dracula for four years in England, was engaged by Liveright to star in the U.S. touring production. The national tour began on 17 September 1928 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. [13] 1951 UK tour [ edit ] 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 ]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.

Kabatchnik, Amnon (2009). Blood on the Stage, 1925–1950: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6963-9.Deane's 1924 version of the play had several significant productions with different casts, including the debut production at the Grand Theatre in Derby, the initial London production at the Little Theatre, and a continuation in London at the Duke of York's Theatre, with the following casts: [10] [29] Casts for productions of the original 1924 version 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.) 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) Born in Chicago, Gorey came from a colourful family; his parents, Helen Dunham Garvey and Edward Lee Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his step-mothers was Corinna Mura, a cabaret singer who had a brief role in the classic film Casablanca. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a popular 19th century greeting card writer/artist, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents. He attended a variety of local grade schools and then the Francis W. Parker School. He spent 1944–1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and then attended Harvard University from 1946 to 1950, where he studied French and roomed with future poet Frank O'Hara. Grams, Martin Jr. (October 2013). "The Quest for the Unholy Grail" (PDF). Radiogram. Society To Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy. pp.8–13.