On Friday 31 May I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a recording from around 1997 of a live theatrical performance of rock opera Tanz Der Vampire in German. It spurred me on to get writing on Substack again because even though other work took priority for a couple of months there, I’ve been to some cool events and have been watching fun shows and reading great books, but fell into lack of time and energy that prevented me from bothering yous in posts about them. I present to you now a flavour, then, of this new-to-me and not new at all piece of European wonder.
A special human in my life has been involved in the Tyne Theatre heritage project for some time and a friend through this invited us to her birthday party held at Star and Shadow cinema where she also volunteers. She’s mad-keen on vampires, and Tanz Der Vampire (Dance of the Vampires), based on the 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers directed by Roman Polanski, who also directed the German-language musical we watched, is her favourite thing ever.
I’ve moved away from such lore in recent years, but vampire stories have been a mainstay for me in my precious incarnations as a film scholar and broadly Irish studies person. I was watching along and remembering all my former goth friends, and friends who are former goths, in Belfast and how much they’d love this, wondering if they’d ever heard of it, because I certainly hadn’t, even though the music composed and arranged by Jim Steinman was largely familiar; the main theme underpinning the score is Steinman’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ joined by melodies from Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell II album, with changed lyrics. During her introduction, R pointed out that ‘Total Eclipse’ had been written for a musical version of Nosferatu that fell through, then was revisited by chance when Steinman was running out of time for the 1997 opening of the theatrical musical in Vienna. It was a vampire love duet all along. If you listen to Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit record with this in mind, it completely makes sense.
Forever’s gonna start tonight…
Tanz Der Vampire is hugely popular across Europe but hasn’t spent much time with English-speaking audiences. On Wikipedia there’s an account of attempts to bring it to New York failing at first largely due to Polanski’s self-exile to evade conviction for raping a minor, and then a lengthy description of events of the ensuing years where production was dogged by many factors, including 9/11 and the stellar cast and behemoth-sized project spiralling out of control before closing after 56 runs. It never made it to the UK.
The original musical version we watched interestingly starred Steve Barton who was in the first cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, later taking the title role on Broadway. And an incredible voice and presence he had, too. In Tanz Der Vampire, as pictured, he’s the main vampire, Count Krolock (not much of a stretch from Orlok in Nosferatu, but an awful lot more charismatic). If you’re familiar with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its many film adaptations and appropriations, the narrative won’t be much of a surprise, but it does push past the extent of the sexual repression in the late-Victorian novel while tapping into its potent forbidden sexualities.
Professor Abronsius and his assistant Alfred are in the Carpathians aiming to prove the existence of vampires. They stay in a Jewish shtetl, where Alfred falls for the innkeeper’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Sarah, who is equally attracted to him. But her father keeps her locked in her room, aware of her burgeoning sexuality, which doesn’t prevent Krolock’s visits that entice her out and towards his mansion full of other vampires he’s collected over the centuries, who are hungry and thirsty in all the ways.
It was a really fun night, and boy did I want to dance with those bloodsucking party animals at the end.