A Very Pink Dracula.

A Very Pink Dracula Colorado Ballet Auditorium Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex Denver, Colorado October 6-28, 2001

It is difficult to find subjects that are suitable for a full-evening ballet yet also have enough name recognition to be viable for the cost of the production. You may think Proust's Remembrance of Things Past would make a smashing ballet--but the title would butter few parsnips, as Nureyev was fond of saying, in the great wide world. But Dracula, now there's a possibility. Vampires are always merchandisable, and, face it, Bram Stoker's good old Vlad Dracula is the signature brand name. When it comes to selling tickets, vampires are almost as good as swans.

The best-known ballet version in the United States is Ben Stevenson's production to Liszt music, created for the Houston Ballet in 1997. But when Artistic Director Martin Fredmann decided to mount a Dracula for his Colorado Ballet, he first found a CD of Philip Feeney's original score written for England's Northern Ballet Theatre five years earlier. Liking what he heard, and saw, in videos of the NBT staging, he invited its British choreographer, Michael Pink, to come to Denver and reconstruct the original NBT production.

Thus the same Brit team--Pink, Feeney, the Tony Award-winning designer Lez Brotherston, and lighting designer Paul Pyant--responsible for Boston Ballet's The Hunchback of Notre Dame last March came together again for this Dracula. It was not the U.S. premiere of the staging--that was done earlier by the Atlanta Ballet, which used the sets and costumes from the NBT production. The new Colorado staging had its own tailor-made sets and costumes, which was a big gamble for the company, but the packed audiences eventually helped to pay it off.

The main difference between this and Stevenson's version is that Stevenson envisaged it as a nineteenth-century Romantic ballet in something of the Giselle mode, complete with classic pas de deux. Pink, who collaborated in the original direction with the late Christopher Gable (very much a man of the theatre), tried far harder to maintain the spirit, atmosphere, and narrative line of the Bram Stoker novel.

With Feeney's vivid and vibrant score--rather stronger than his work for Hunchback, and powerfully conducted by Akira Endo--Pink, enormously helped by his immensely skilled designers, presents a dramatic ballet very much in the British tradition of Kenneth MacMillan or Ronald Hynd. The flaw is that the choreography itself--particularly for Dracula--is neither so commanding nor so effective as the actual staging, which is often happily creepy in its suggestion of quiet crepuscular horror.

The company on the first night gave a splendid performance, with even such principal dancers as the buoyant Koichi Kubo shining in comparatively minor roles. Perhaps the one fault that could be found in the performance was in the less-than-charismatic interpretation of Dracula himself by a comparative newcomer, Zhuang Hua, who looked magnificent but gave a portrayal that had more of the poignancy of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin than the evil, tempting glitter of a Dracula.