I hope you folks know we have these amazing Tanz videos in HD on YT! ✶⋆.˚ [I‘ll update this post whenever I have new links]
Vienna October 12, 1999 (Nicholas Saverine, Michaela Kovarikova)
Hamburg November 10, 2005 (Kevin Tarte, Jessica Kessler) [proshot]
Oberhausen September 27, 2010 (Kevin Tarte, Nele-Liis Vaiksoo)
Vienna February 17, 2011 (Alexander di Capri, Barbara Obermeier, Lukas Perman)
Berlin January 18, 2012 (Drew Sarich, Amelie Dobler, Anton Zetterholm)
The 2012 video is the one you all know, that was mislabelled as 2011 until now. Plus it’s been edited so there‘s more close-ups from a second video of the same date! ✨
This blog isn't used very often these days, but you might recall that I once announced a podcast titled A Good Nightmare Comes So Rarely, intended to further explore the case study I conducted on the issues that arose when Tanz der Vampire became Dance of the Vampires.
Apart from the two episodes that actually saw release, my co-host @ozymegdias and I actually got pretty deep into research, learning a lot in particular about the mysterious April 2001 staged reading before everything went to shit, the one that starred Steve Barton reprising his award-winning performance as the Graf, under the direction of John Caird (Les Mis, Jane Eyre, etc.) Caird was very generous with his time, as was William Youmans (Abronsius in the reading; he went on to become the original Dr. Dillamond in Wicked).
Apart from that, though, it was difficult to break the cone of silence that the final cast and creative team seemed to have entered surrounding DOTV; between that and waning interest on my co-host's part as development dragged on and on, I decided to let it die.
However, the research material won't go to waste. DOTV has been on Wait in the Wings' docket for a long time, and I'm turning everything I have over to them to build an in-depth mini-doc around. (Eventually. They've got a lot of ground to cover on other shows first.)
I've also decided to share a portion of the source work with the general public. (That includes you, @alfredismyson.) Hit the jump!
You see, I (foolishly, as it turned out) anticipated not only that the audience would be large (it wasn't), but that it could include people unfamiliar with the many flavors of Tanz (ultimately hard to tell).
To familiarize them with the successful version, I created a selection of YouTube playlists for viewing and enrichment. They are listed below:
Original Replica -- In other words, a sampling of the most common version of Tanz, with the Bill Dudley/Sue Blane designs. I pulled together everything I could find on YouTube, from 1997 to at least 2019.
Revival Replica -- In 2007, Kentaur began making his design mark with the Hungarian production, and later replicated his efforts in Vienna and Russia. Again, pulled together all the ones I could find on YT.
Non-Replica -- This is the most fun playlist of all, at least for me! It collects the outliers, the productions that may have had recognizable features in common with the other Tanz-es out there but otherwise marched to the beat of their own drum. You'll see videos of Poland, Japan, Slovakia, two from the infamous St Gallen, a handful of clips from the one-night-only concert staging at Operafest Tulchyn in Ukraine (it was sung live in German, and they maneuvered around not being allowed to properly stage it by projecting the 2005 Berlin pro-shot upstage to give a semblance of plot and otherwise distracting the audience at times with admittedly awesome choreography and firework), and even an unauthorized Spanish translation from Mexicali. In the case of at least three of these productions, it will reflect the 1997 version, with apologies to fans of the new "Die Roten Stiefel/Gebet" (like me), so you might even see and hear stuff that has seldom been seen or heard since Tanz's earliest days. Enter with an open mind, and see what a different view may offer!
Hope you enjoy (some of) the fruits of our labors.
Due to illness, I'm forced to sell my ticket to Tanz der Vampire in Stuttgart on Saturday, 7th January 2023, 2.30pm. I'm absolutely gutted to miss this performance; it's Thomas Borchert's first show in this run!
1. Rang, 9. Reihe - asking for 80€ (less than the original ticket price). @denise8691 has the ticket and will be there too.
Because I am not done talking about Dance of the Vampires.
If you want to see what I had to say about act 1 here are the links to my other posts
Bc I truly cannot wrap my head around some of the decisions made for this adaptation.
I particularly want to talk about what they did to "
I'm not familiar with European Musicals. I thought Dance of the Vampires was some kind of parody in the vein of Mel Brooks? Am I incorrect?
Now, the good news is that this second act is probably the better half of the musical. It's less consistently bad and a little closer to the European version, there are even a scant hand full of things that work.
But the bad stuff is really bad.
After Crawford sings the midnight serenade to Sarah we cut right to Total Eclipse of the Heart.
The problems in this number aren't anything we haven't seen before, I mean Crawford has been an unwelcome presence for most of act one, the choreography is shit, and the set, if you can call it that, is pretty pathetic, (fucking bleachers!) but I want to talk about a few things I haven't really gone into detail about yet.
The music. For the most part the music is generally the same, although it does sound like someone took Tanz and shrunk it. The orchestra and choir really lack the epic quality of the European version, but whatever, it's close enough. I'll give credit to Mandy Gonzales, she sounds great. In fact she sounds so good here that it just serves to highlight how awful Michael Crawford is.
Then you get to the lyrics.
The lyrics are a huge problem with this adaptation because in a lot of key songs, they weren't actually adapted. What we got in the final product isn't a translation of Michael Kunze's lyrics, rather it's a copy/paste of the existing lyrics (with some minor tweaks) from Jim Steinman's songs.
It's easy to say this was done out of laziness but given what I know and recently have learned of Jim Steinman I'd say it's very likely he didn't want his lyrics compromised. He has a reputation for being a massive ego and I'd be lying if I said I couldn't see the telltale Jim fingerprints all over the final product. I may expand on that later, but before I deviate too much from my initial point.
The lyrics.
Because they are cut and pasted from existing songs they no longer sound like the voices of the characters. They sound like the voice of Jim Steinman. In Total Eclipse Von Krolock sounds lovesick rather than predatory and Sarah sounds like a world weary old soul who's been burned before and is afraid to love again.... instead of... you know... and 18 year old girl who's never left her father's inn. This is even more egregious in Starker Als Wir Sind/Braver Than We Are because so much of the English version's lyrics are vague biblical metaphors that don't actually make much sense coming from a character like Sarah.
Example in Braver Than We Are Sarah sings "How can we fly like an angel in the sacred air?" At first that kind of sounds pretty, but in the context of the moment it doesn't really fit. It has almost nothing to do with what Sarah is doing or feeling and it's just empty imagery.
This is a fairly consistent shortcoming of Jim Steinman's songwriting. Style over substance plagues a lot of his songs. Even his best songs sometimes have weird lyrics that sound cool but don't actually mean anything.
Amazingly that doesn't hurt his music nearly as much as it should. All three Bat out of Hell albums are pretty strong, so much so that I'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite between them.
In the context of a musical, however, it's a different story.
Let's take a look at the Tanz version to do a comparison.
The lyrics here illustrate a Sarah that is giving into temptation but feels shades of regret. Even as much as she wants what's being offered she knows there's no going back. Superficially it doesn't seem that different in theme from the English version but the lyrics do a better job of revealing Sarah's thought process.
Speaking of temptation let's touch on that for a sec, temptation and resisting it vs giving in is a huge theme of this musical. Draußen ist Freiheit and especially Das Gebet are all about temptation. How it pulls us, how the thing that finally breaks our resolve must be stronger than we are. Sarah is tempted by a voice that calls to her and offers her something dark, sensual, and forbidden. A fall from grace that will damn her forever but grant her her wildest dreams. Really the overarching theme of temptation needs its own post because there are so many layers, so I'll save it for after I've finished my breakdown of the full play.
We spend all of Draußen, Starker, and Das Gebet watching Sarah teeter on the edge and Finsternis is where she finally falls. There is a LOT of emotion here. The lyrics beautifully illustrate what she's feeling and how Von Krolock continues to suck her in by offering her her dreams.
In other words less this
and more this...
hell even this would have been preferable...
... you know I'm starting to see a pattern with young girls name Sarah and mystical older men in uncomfortably tight pants.
So why doesn't Tanz suffer from the same problem's with lyrics?
Probably because Steinman doesn't speak German and so had little say over how his songs got adapted into the German language.
The lyricist for Tanz is Michael Kunze, known for his work on Elisabeth and Rebecca and Kunze is honestly a wonderful lyricist. He does an excellent job giving each character a consistent voice while giving the lyrics depth and nuance. Which might not have saved the Broadway version, but it would definitely have helped.
Speaking of lacking depth and nuance....the next scene is the one where Von Krolock greets Alfred and Abronsius at the gate of his...
.... completely empty stage.
Hang on to your butts folks. It's gonna get real ugly.
