At the Noël Coward Theater in London, Cynthia Erivo takes the stage in a sports tank top and pants, a blank sartorial canvas that will be embellished with a variety of wigs and period garb. Cutting a striking figure with her shaved head, sinewy physique and long nails, the “Wicked” star has no one for company except a black-clad camera crew that records her every move and broadcasts it on a vast screen.
This real-time footage is spliced with recorded clips of Erivo, so that we often see two Erivos simultaneously, and sometimes three or four. Over the next two hours, she plays 23 roles in a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
The subject is vampirism, and the medium looks very much like sorcery.
“Dracula” — adapted and directed by Kip Williams, and running through May 30 — is a homecoming of sorts for the London-born Erivo, who appeared in several West End stage productions before her Broadway breakthrough, “The Color Purple.” A decade and two “Wicked” movies later, she’s a global star with a string of industry accolades to her name.
This one-woman show is a demanding test for any performer. Williams’ 2024 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” constructed along similar lines, earned its star, Sarah Snook, a Tony and an Olivier. Erivo holds her own despite a few first-night line fluffs, and if the production falters, it’s for reasons largely extraneous to her.
This is not a blood-and-gore “Dracula.” The grislier scenes are related through narration only; the emphasis is on atmosphere rather than shock.
The story is told through fast-paced, epistolary narration by multiple characters, starting with the lawyer Jonathan Harker, who travels to Romania at the behest of the titular count — voiced by Erivo with a Nigerian accent and an eerily placid diction — to help facilitate his move to London.
Erivo’s previous stage roles have mostly been in musical theater, and although “Dracula” features only a brief snippet of song, the show’s timbre is at times vaudeville-adjacent.
Erivo occasionally throws a knowing glance to the audience in recognition that a conversation has taken a weird turn.
There were ripples of audience laughter at the premiere on Tuesday for many of her co-star doppelgängers’ first onscreen appearances: in a platinum blonde wig as poor Lucy Westenra, who turns into a vampire after Dracula attacks her; and in an assortment of beards and mustaches to play Lucy’s three hapless male suitors.
When Dracula’s nemesis, Prof. Van Helsing, brings garlic to Lucy’s sickbed in hopes of defanging her, he turns up with about a dozen wreaths of the stuff, like some crazed interior decorator.
It is hard to sustain a sense of menace amid such mirth, and the production can’t quite decide whether it wants frighten us or gently send up the horror genre.
In Williams’s previous shows, there was an intelligible connection between the use of camerawork and the themes at the heart of the story: vanity and moral degeneracy in “Dorian Gray”; fame-hunger and parasocial resentment in “The Maids”; the distance between inner and outer lives in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” This is not the case with “Dracula.”
The camerawork does generates a noir-ish frisson, mostly derived from the uncanniness of seeing the same actor in multiple iterations at once. But the brooding close-ups — of Erivo baring her fangs, or biting her lip suggestively — are a little schlocky. And besides, we have television for that.
Other production elements are more stylish. A scene in a churchyard features a hauntingly chaotic array of wooden crosses, and another features an arresting heart-shaped doorway. (Set design is by Marg Howell.)
A key moment plays out amid a confetti snowscape as thrumming techno builds to a deafening climax. It’s suitably intense, but the spell is broken when the screen cuts to Van Helsing during a moment of high tension: There’s something about the sight of a smooth-skinned lady with a stick-on beard that extracts you from the realm of terror. Whereas the tongue-in-cheek archness of Williams’s Wilde and Genet treatments felt true to the spirit of their works, it doesn’t quite land here.
This is a shame, because “Dracula” is a story with contemporary resonance. The novel was first published in 1897, when Victorian society was reckoning with a syphilis epidemic and proto-feminist campaigners were calling out the sexual improprieties of powerful men. We might note some parallels in the case of the sex offender financier Jeffrey Epstein, in whom an interest in longevity and transhumanism seems to have dovetailed with a proclivity for abuse. The similarities with Dracula, whose “undead” existence is sustained at considerable cost to those around him, feel all too relevant.
Ditto the novel’s racial dimension, which played on xenophobic distrust toward London’s East European Jews in the 1890s. Erivo’s African-coded Count brings this up-to-date — while also nodding to the actress’s own Igbo roots — but for the most part the production declines to engage with the moment. The source material is merely a conduit for the director and star actor to showcase their virtuosity.
This won’t matter greatly to the large and dedicated “Wicked” fan base, which is mostly on the younger side and will be thrilled to see Erivo in the flesh. It would be apt indeed if this vanity project were sustained by the blind devotion of the young — sucking their blood by proxy and relieving parents of their hard-earned cash.
Dracula Through May 30 at the Noël Coward Theater in London; draculawestend.com.
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