OffOffOnline.com review:
While remaining faithful to Bram Stoker's classic, writer and director Eileen Connolly has entirely revamped Dracula into a multimedia extravaganza that emphasizes the sultry "vamp" in "vampires." The show proceeds by way of a sampler platter of camp theatrical forms: it is by turns fashion show, ballet, striptease, opera, drug-induced fantasia, puppet theater, school lesson, mockumentary, ballroom dancing, oversized chess game, booming discotheque, hypnosis-by-swirling-umbrella, and poetry both high and low.

As if all of this weren't enough, there is also plenty of the requisite necking and sucking. In fact, the opening sequence begins with an entirely naked woman writhing sensually, her back to the audience. She is loosely wrapped from the waist down in translucent plastic. Off to the side, a senile nun sits crocheting a long, red scarf while she mumbles the rosary. 

....Kitschy? Of course! The whole show has a deft, debonair touch that makes the 90 minutes swim along with humor and high spirits. Dracula, played with flourish by Richard Omar, lisps in a faint parody of a Romanian accent while he gallivants with grandeur about the stage, indiscriminately biting both men and women alike. The vampire brides, ranging from the gazelle-like to the voluptuous, all with kohl-rimmed eyes and baring generous amounts of cleavage, strike tableaux as Dracula's willing minions.

One particularly effective sequence has three corseted vampire brides in dishabille using their outstretched bodies to create a labyrinth of walls, windows, and secret passageways through which Jonathan Harker, the hapless real estate agent, pursues the Count. Daniel Wolfe, playing Harker, does an excellent job portraying the bright-eyed naiveté that quivers on the cusp of giving in to darker urges.

Another memorable scene has Harker, along with two investigators, tiptoeing through the catacombs in search of the undead. Flashlights are cast through the darkness until they alight on a corpse; faint silhouettes of pale naked bodies then scramble away into a lush tapestry of shadows.

While some parts of the show may evoke comparisons to Rocky Horror, such as the title number when Dracula induces Harker to join him for some bisexual bump-and-grind, Dance has a more sensual, artful feel to it overall. For example, the motif of rising en pointe, used as a physical metaphor for sexual tension and ecstasy when a vampire draws blood, partakes of high (rather than low) camp sensibilities. Likewise, the smorgasbord of languages that are slipped into the characters' dialogue lends the play a worldly flair.

The original musical compositions, written by Rob Arthur, and the arias sung by Lianne Marie Dobbs also enhance the sumptuous frisson of the whole.

The medley of different mediums -- such as the marionette bat or the model buildings of the castle and its environs displayed during a kind of disco chorus line-- are not so much avant-garde poses as experiments in fun. For all its lightness, however, the play touches on serious themes. In fact, the curtain call has a voice-over of W.B. Yeats's haunting poem "Never Give All the Heart."

Ultimately, the play is about our lurid fascination with evil, and evil's power to transgress the precarious boundaries of decorum. The sheer gratuitousness of the play's theatricality, the outlandish dance routines, and the nakedness itself is the point: evil is the excess that urges us to be heedless in the face of propriety. And that's dead sexy.

  BACKSTAGE review:
Connolly's handsome stage pictures seductively draw the audience into her world. When the play opens, a nude woman rises from a rumpled sheet of plastic, seemingly summoned into the arms of the show's charismatic, rock-star-modeled Dracula (Richard Omar). The plastic, wrapped at the woman's waist, resembles the train of a Victorian gown, and as she crumples to the floor, her life force consumed, the plastic crinkles eerily. Throughout, Connolly uses this material ingeniously, its sound often recalling the flutter of bats' wings.

Further pulling theatregoers into "Harker" are the performances, such as that of the double-cast ...Shelleen Kostabi, who imbues both Dracula's first British victim, Lucy (often dancing on pointe), and his henchman, the insane Renfield, with a delicious otherworldliness. Daniel Wolfe makes Jonathan Harker effete and ineffectual, a man easily seduced by his Transylvanian host, and he and Omar fully explore the homoerotic aspects of the men's relationship.  Clad in a blood-red 1950s skirt and jacket (Connolly is also responsible for the set and costume design, which spans many periods), Lianne Marie Dobbs ably blends pertness with sweet simplicity as Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray. 

....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...The use of video, song, and a plethora of foreign languages seem designed to lend Harker a timeless, international flavor...

The cast earns high marks for committing fully to the approach, and Connolly is to be credited for her thoroughly modern spin....