#Taniec Wampirow

[gdelgiproducer]

Announcing... a new podcast

Welp, I’ve been off this platform for some time. If I was coming back, it’d be to promote this notion for sure. Hello, #tanzblr; breadman missed you.

Coming soon to a podcast platform near you, in the vein of Out for Blood’s retrospective coverage of Carrie and after much development (probably closer to next year than this year): 

A Good Nightmare Comes So Rarely: The Rise and Fall of Dance of the Vampires.

The pitch:

When most American theater aficionados think of Dance of the Vampires, they don't think of a show that’s run successfully for 9,300+ performances, in 12 languages, in 14 countries, bringing in an audience of over 9.6 million. They think of its brief New York run starring Michael Crawford, which was such a critical and commercial disaster that it totally eclipsed the infamous Carrie in financial loss, set the new bar for legendary flops (at least until Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark came along), and is still widely cited as proof of the ‘wisdom’ that ‘vampire musicals don’t work on Broadway.’

20 years on, it’s time for a post-mortem. Two obsessive fans dive deep into the story behind its creation, interviewing cast, crew, creators, and detractors and fans alike who watched from the peanut gallery, as they recall all the gory details of the road to Manhattan, from the creation of the original Roman Polanski source film in the mid-Sixties to the present day.

When I say “two obsessive fans”... yeah, I’m co-hosting with ozymegdias. (As she has had significant input on my further development of the fabled ‘new English version more faithful to the European original,’ that may come up as well. We’re debating whether or not it’s necessary; I think it’s a novel hook.)

If you’d like to contribute, we’re looking for “detractors and fans alike”: enthusiasts of Tanz, of DOTV (slim crowd, but they exist), of both (even slimmer crowd, but they, too, exist), and rubber-neckers who watched the proverbial auto accident with interest, the kind of people who can offer color commentary of the “from the sidelines” variety. Get in touch!

[jadeite-art]

Portrait of a Vampire

I tried merging various Krolock actors and this was the face I liked best. It’s a mix of Drewlock, Krolocchi and Janlock. 

Check out the one I did of Herbert

[taniecwampirow]

Did you know that you can watch the whole Polish Tanz on youtube? Probably yes, but If you didn’t, there you go! Here’s link for the first part.

[balladofthesadcat]

Tanz Tag Game

I was tagged by @tanz-der-vampire-musical, thanks a lot! ^_^

How did you discover Tanz? I discovered Tanz der Vampire when I was staying over at a friend's house after I had a very bad thing happen to me at home and she told me to go over and spend the night there with her and her boyfriend. We watched a movie (Paul) and she showed me funny videos on YouTube and then a few songs and clips from the Hungarian production. Instant love. The next season it was on in Budapest I went to see it and ever since then I always go and watch it at least once per season.

Favourite Krolock: I love each for their own portrayal. But if I had to pick, Bot Gábor, all in all he's my favourite.

How many times have you been to the show? I lost count. xD

Which did you like more the current sets and costumes or the original set and costumes? I love each version. I really don't have a preference. I just love the whole thing as it is. It is a miracle for me.

Favourite song from the show? CARPE NOCTEM IS DEFINITELY THE NUMBER ONE FOR ME. <3 Then (not in order of preference): Öröklét (Ewigkeit), Míg szeret a szíved (Wenn Liebe in dir ist) and Piros csizmák (Rote Stiefel).

A part that gives you chills? When the second part's finale song is playing and the ensemble reaches the point when they come forth to the front of the stage and the music picks up too. The lyrics go like this: "...most indul még / Csak most indul a nagy vámpírtánc" and that's when they turn on the spotlights on them and they all dance forth. Another part that completely shakes me to my core is when in Carpe Noctem after the second chorus it softens down and then all the deep male voices start chanting "Carpe noctem, carpe noctem" underneath it all. Just wow.

Dream cast: I picked one I would really want to see in action.

Graf von Krolock: Zöld Csaba (I saw him twice one season and I don't think he'll play the role anymore, but damn, that voice. So yeah, that's why I picked him. Impossible. xD :-/)

Sarah: Simon Boglárka Panna

Alfred: Héger Tibor

Professor Abronsius: Jegercsik Csaba

Herbert: Szemenyei János

Chagal: Pavletits Béla

Magda: Kecskés Tímea

Favourite quote from the show? "A napfényes világ / E boldogságból semmit se lát" (Carpe Noctem)

One thing you would change in the show? I would love to see more of Herbert, really. Other than that, nothing I can think of. But here I'd like to mention that although there's little room for changes in the lyrics and melodies and movements, I just love how they still manage to change one word sometimes for spice and how each cast member has their own unique way of portrayal, how they play with some notes and tones and how they slip in a move that just completely dazzles and entertains.

[savingthegeneration]

Tanz der Vampire Warsaw cast - Nienasycony Głód

[wildlingcorner]

Mortals feed on hope so they patiently endure pain   I want to be sated for once but my hunger never ceases 

[suckingfordummies-blog]

Welcome to my tumblr blog~  Instagram isn’t enough for me anymore, so stay tuned for awesome photos, videos and (un)life tips from your favourite dead redhead and her family~

(photo by @bittersuites)

[martian-night]

Taniec Wampirow - Piekna Corka

[amuseoffyre]

I always thought Jakub Wocial's Herbert in Taniec Wampirow was as camp as he could go. Turns out that no. He was holding back. Especially for the final crack performance.

[gdelgiproducer]

Possibly an unpopular opinion

Recently, on Reddit, I came across the phrase “Dance of the Vampires is barely even Tanz der Vampire” in a discussion. I debated whether or not to share this opinion in response to that general point (of which I’ve heard many variations over the years), but as somebody who’s been as close to the show as I have, I think I’ve earned the right to do so.

That opinion is: they’re really not super different.

The humor is arguably shittier in DOTV, yes (to the extent one can argue that a phallic sponge is that big a step down from, say, playing “uh-oh, it’s a booby” to discover that it’s not Chagal under the sheet), but take away the most egregious elements, and it’s not nearly as different from Tanz as people have made it out to be.

Which is not to say DOTV isn’t the worse version; it absolutely is. But it’s over-simplifying things to say that one is a brooding, sensual, dark, Gothic opera, the potential result if Anne Rice wrote a vampire musical (that worked), and the other is a campy Mel Brooks-reminiscent romp, especially when...

They stem from the same source material.

They feature largely the same score and many of the same characters and plot points, even if the portrayal of the latter is different.

Both, each in their own way, send up the mega-musical genre / format.

Both can’t really decide whether they’re fish or flesh, comedy or serious drama, and wind up being neither. (Let’s not forget... in both versions, the audience is asked to swallow “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as a serious love duet between a vampire and his potential victim at the top of Act II, sharing space with a song later in the same act where said vampire lectures us on how our greed will be our doom, monologuing about the existential pain of eternal life and of losing everything and everyone he loves. The phrase “one of these things is not like the other...” comes swiftly to mind.)

The real, salient difference is in the basic approach to each. As George Abbott, Broadway’s all-time greatest musical comedy director, once said, “If you play it for comedy, it won’t work; if you play it for real, it will.”

Tanz camouflaged its inconsistency by playing it straight, with focused, detailed direction and a (mostly) dark sense of humor. The acting style seemed to follow a principle aptly described by Keythe Farley (of the Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles) as “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity” -- in other words, an extremely sincere approach, one where the cast takes it so seriously it’s funny, but it also hurts. What comedy existed wasn’t overplayed, so that when one of the handful of emotional moments came along, it was able to hit its target. (I put this in past tense because, in my opinion, Stage Entertainment has been doing it so long that it’s gotten very watered-down; the humor now seems to be overplayed to such an extent that the more emotional moments aren’t landing.)

DOTV, on the other hand, opted for a broad, silly angle that milked every “punchline” it could, as much as possible, and it was about as focused as a nervous driver after twelve rounds of tequila.

One way is just better than another at masking the show’s flaws.

[gdelgiproducer]

Tanz vs. DOTV: Something to ponder

(Content warning: use of a common five-letter word for the female anatomy to illustrate a point)

Hi, everyone! Vulture article plugging aside, it’s been a little while since I used this platform to directly discuss the differences between Tanz der Vampire and (what I hesitate to call) its New York incarnation, Dance of the Vampires. A lot of people have already identified the key problems, me being extra loud and verbose at it, with what DOTV did on the road to Broadway that sunk its chances. But there are always new things to discover, and I thought this little illustration which occurred to me recently might add more to the overall picture.

Over the years, I’ve been none too subtle -- perhaps jaundiced by my own experience with the man, I’ll admit -- in pointing a finger of blame at Jim Steinman, arguing that, far from the remove at which he placed himself in retrospect, he was an engine behind many unnecessary changes which were not related to Michael Crawford’s creative control. As someone who spearheaded the closest thing to a reboot Tanz will ever have in English (which will hopefully see the light of day in the future as more than two rough demos), I spent a lot of time with 1) Michael Kunze’s original draft, dated July 1997, 2) at least four drafts of the script for DOTV, and 3) watching my team develop its own version from the original German, so I know whereof I speak.

Now, many of Jim’s fans who heard about our effort around the time it began scoffed upon hearing about it, partly because I was a purveyor of Encyclopedia Dramatica level fandom wank as a kid and they didn’t trust the source (why lie, the Internet is a semi-permanent archive of one’s faults) and partly because they didn’t see the need for a new translation when surely Jim and/or Michael Kunze had already done a faithful English draft: “Who are these assholes to interject?”

Well, there’s an easy answer to that: Kunze’s draft, like many of his English lyrics to his own work, bears no comparison to his work in German. (A first-year ESL student probably would do a better job. That sounds harsh, but ask Kunze’s fans. There are very few who will disagree.) As for Jim, it became quite clear that when he didn’t just re-use Kunze’s English version of the material and substitute a word or phrase here and there, capturing the German meaning in his... we’ll call them more loosely adapted... lyrics was not even remotely on his mind. Indeed, there were times he took something beautiful and made it downright creepy.

A handy example is “Für Sarah.” Michael Kunze wrote a straightforward innocent love song, with maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing. The point is that Alfred’s not a romantic hero, and that’s the joke. You root for him, but you pity him. You’d think they’d honor that in an English version with better phrasing or a different way to say the same thing.

Instead, Jim Steinman, in his quest to make Alfred a romantic hero (an “impetuous young gallant,” in Giovanni’s ultimate words), shoehorned in brooding imagery that turned it into a ghastly incel anthem, and I can prove it by changing literally just one word of his lyric for the song:

Substitute “pussy” for every instance of “Sarah.” (Example: “I will slash / I will burn / There is nothing / I would not do or be / For pussy...”) 

See? Altering one word is all it takes to picture a pimply neck-beard idolizing a “dream girl” that doesn’t even know both that he exists and has built a hidden shrine to her. For that matter, the whole song is turned into a litany of horrible “male power fantasy” things this guy, who is supposed to be a shrinking violet in the original version, would do for her: stealing, lying, slashing, burning... none of this is in the German at all, but leave it to Jim to introduce it!

Not to toot my own horn too loudly about something people may never see, but my team’s translation, while it may not always have said exactly the same thing as Kunze did in German, at least tried to capture the same imagery and emotion in it. More than I can say for Jim. Way more than I can say.

[gdelgiproducer]

Look, Mom, I made the papers! (Sort of. They omitted a significant portion of the info I gave them, which is interesting considering they devoted substantial time to the efforts of an attempted revision of that veritable chestnut It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman in their other story for this series.)

If this article is hidden behind a paywall for you, DM me. In the meantime, I paste here the comment I made on said article:

Though I'm well aware this comment may seem the kind of nitpicking that would come from the fan Ms. Shaw describes, upon reading this otherwise very accurate and fair article, I was a little dismayed to see what I told her at length reduced to a couple of sentences in the final paragraph largely emphasizing my fandom. Whether due to time constraints in writing/editing or being erroneously considered outside the scope of the article, Ms. Shaw significantly downplays my (as she puts it) "trying to broker work with the man himself," especially as it relates to the article's content.

I'm a working producer actively involved in project development for stage, screen, and television (going on 15 years of 'almost famous' now, though that may be partially because I hang on to shows with flop stench like this one), and I devoted valuable time and effort -- at least three years and seven figures' worth of active development -- to creating a more faithful English stage adaptation of Tanz der Vampire. I assembled a creative team including a noted writer-director-producer who has worked extensively Off-Broadway, and was also previously a senior vice president of both NBC and Warner Bros. affiliates, by any account a major writing presence in media today.

We had both written and verbal authorization from Jim Steinman, a stream of interest from name stars and major U.S. film studio distributors based on our script and two rough demos, and were in the midst of preparing a reading with top-shelf Broadway talent when we were stonewalled by people on the European side of the table. Mr. Steinman proved singularly unhelpful in pleading our case.

It has since become increasingly apparent that he may or may not have had the right to commission such work from us, and years of my life, and the lives of members of our creative / project development unit, were used casually and recklessly. We have this completely documented at a level suitable for litigation, and there are several witnesses, including members of the original Austrian cast, such as Gernot Kranner, who advocated our script as "brilliant" and would confirm the outstanding artistic quality of the endeavor.

Our script is a superior English edition of the piece. The text is very faithful to the spirit of the German original and the underlying source movie, while maintaining an efficacy and substantial English-language virtue and vitality all its own. We would still like to effect a solution to the current situation.

[gdelgiproducer]

Oh, you won’t even believe what’s happening...

[taniecwampirow]

“Wenn Liebe in dir ist” and “Cape Noctem” rehearsals with Jakub Wocial.

[taniecwampirow]

First Act of the last Warsaw show is on youtube now. Here’s Part 1. 

Enjoy!

[taniecwampirow]

And this is how Polish TdV program looked like. 

The front cover: 

And the back cover (with theater’s name on it):

The “front part” contained some information about TdV creators, but also instructions for vampire hunters, for example -  how the stakes should look like and the list of hunters’ accessories:

Blood is everywhere.

There were some photos of the vampires too, but unfortunately, not many.