#Vampirok Balja

[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!

[prettynerdieworks]

Bot Gábor in Vámpírok bálja ✦ Budapest

[ballerinadellamusica]

The 8 Sarah’s of Vámpírok bálja.

Vámpírok bálja will introduce their 8th Sarah this year, Dorka Pacskó (HU: Pacskó Dorka) will join the cast & Zsazsa Réthy (HU: Réthy Zsazsa) is returning to the role after 4 years.

Below are the 8 Sarah’s that have performed the role in Hungary.

1- Andrádi Zsanett 2007-2012, 10th anniversary (2017) & 300 performance celebration (2018)

2- Kovács Nikoletta (Lotti) 2007-2009 & 300 performances celebration (2018)

3- Stróbel Dóra 2007

4- Nádorfi Krisztina 2007-2009

5- Török Anna 2010-2019

6- Simon Panna Boglárka 2012-2019

7- Réthy Zsazsa 2012-2017 & 2021

8- Pacskó Dorka 2021

Dates are estimates based on what I can find online.

Pictures: Vámpírok bálja, Nádorfi Krisztina & Pacskó Dorka Facebook/Instagram

(Photographers: Sárközy Marianna, Kálay Ildikó, Szakács Domonkos)

[miscellaneums]

anyone know where i can watch a hungarian production of tanz der vampire in full? google and youtube have failed me, maybe im just not looking up the right things?

[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

[honeybee-bzz]

Welcome to the first-ever Tumblr Tanz der Vampire Secret Santa exchange! Based on the successful PotO Secret Santa run by @rjdaae, I have decided to host one for the Tanz community this year. I hope lots of you participate and have fun! 

What’s a Secret Santa?

A Secret Santa (for the large number of German Tanz fans: Wichteln) is a fun holiday gift exchange. Every one who participates in this exchange is assigned a “santa”, who will anonymously send them nice messages and a gift. This means everyone gets a santa, and everyone is someone else’s santa! At Christmas, you can reveal your identities to each other. It’s not only a fun community project, but also a great way of making new friends :D

How can I participate?

Once you have filled out this form, I will send you an ask on tumblr to confirm I got your submission. If you don't hear from me within two days, send me a message and I'll get things sorted :)

You will then be assigned a “giftee” with whom you will anonymously communicate and to whom you will send a gift. Please be advised that once sign-ups close and assignments are handed out, you are obliged to send a gift.

What kind of gifts are allowed?

Both mailed and digital gifts are fine, and they can be anything - art, writing, crafting. You can buy or make anything you like, as long as it’s appropriate. The gift does not have to be Tanz-related either, though that’s certainly a plus!;)

Please note: If any of you are able to receive a mailed gift, but may not be at home for the holidays, please let me know via ask or private message so I can inform your santa in time.

Do I have to send/be able to receive a physical gift?

No, you can specify what kind of gift you would like to send and receive, and I will try to match you all up accordingly.

SIGN UPS END ON NOVEMBER 24th, 11pm GMT+1. You will be assigned a giftee until NOVEMBER 26th.

PLEASE READ THE RULES BELOW BEFORE PARTICIPATING!

Please read the following rules very carefully:

• You must be a member of tumblr to participate.

• You must reblog the official sign-up post on tumblr.

• You must have your askbox open. (You do not have to enable anon, but please remember that your secret santa will not be able to communicate with you then.)

• Once you have been assigned a giftee, spend the time leading up to Christmas getting to know them a little. Making a new friend is part of the fun of this exchange!

• Sending a gift is obligatory once you have signed up. If you are unable to mail a physical gift, digital gifts are also welcome. (Please try to time your gift to arrive before the end of December if you are choosing the first option!) If you do have a valid reason for stepping out of the exchange, such as an illness or another unforeseeable dilemma, please contact rumpelstiltskinned on tumblr as soon as you can.

• The Secret Santa is a worldwide event, open to people in every country. (Please be aware that, depending on your location and postage concerns, it might not be possible for you to receive a gift in the mail; in such a case, you can still participate via digital gift!)

• The Secret Santa is open to all ages. (If you are a minor, please ask your parent/guardian for permission.)

• For safety purposes, all gift ideas must be approved by tumblr user rumpelstiltskinned before being sent (including digital gifts).

• Following the Secret Santa organizer, rumpelstiltskinned, is not required in order to take part in the Secret Santa exchange. Following the '#tdv secret santa' tag is recommended, though, to help keep track of status updates.

• Please try not to reveal your identity before your giftee has their gift (it's a nice idea to put a note with your url in the package, if mailing something!) Part of the fun is the mystery of not knowing who your santa is!

• You do not have to reveal yourself on a specific day, though ideally around the actual Christmas holidays (i.e. December 24th/25th depending on where you live). If anyone has not yet received their gift by late December/early January, please let me know.

• Read the full sign-up post for full details and information. Please contact me if you have any questions.

[wildlingcorner]

(insp.)

[amuseoffyre]

El nem múló vágy - Egyházi Géza

[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.

[ballerinadellamusica]

Vámpírok Bálja is performing in Hungary in October 2017. Performances: Október 4. 19:00 Október 5. 19:00 Október 6. 19:00 Október 7. 15:00 & 19:30 Október 8. 15:00 & 19:30

Szereposztás: Krolock: Egyházi Géza/Bot Gábor/Zöld Csaba Sarah: Török Anna/Simon Boglárka Panna Alfred: Pásztor Ádám/Héger Tibor Professzor: Illés Dániel/Sándor Dávid/Jegercsik Csaba Chagal: Pavletits Béla Magda: Sári Éva/Kecskés Tímea/Horváth Mónika Rebecca: Kokas Piroska Koukol: Umbráth László Herbert: Szemenyei János/Jenei Gábor Nightmare 1: Mező Márió/Károlyi Krisztián Nightmare 2: Táborosi Márk

Red boots Ballet: Csepi Ádám, Horváth Zita,Varga Kinga Black vampire: Túri Lajos White vampire: Fischer Tamás, Házi Tamás Ensemble: Lopusny Anna (Dance Captain), Stróbel Dóra(choirmaster), Ajtai Beáta, Sinkó Réka, Pethő Dorottya, Miklós Eponin, Baksa András, Juhász Richárd, Szabó Anikó, Nagy Sarolta, Szabados Tímea, Tiborcz Fanni, Ködmen Krisztián, Kelemen Krisztián

The following principals will appear in the ensemble when not in lead role: Török Anna, Horváth Mónika, Jenei Gábor

Pictures from Vámpírok Bálja facebook

[michi-heller]

YES ANOTHER VIDEO

[honeybee-bzz]

hey tanzblr

Has there ever been a secret santa exchange in the tanz community? if not, would you guys be interested in participating in one? please like this post if you are to give me an idea of how many people would be up for this.

[wildlingcorner]

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

[noctem-aura-blog]

[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.

[ballerinadellamusica]

Vámpírok Bálja október calendars: 1- Krolock 2- Sarah 3- Alfred 4- Professzor 5- Chagal 6- Magda 7- Rebecca 8- Koukol 9- Herbert 10- Nightmare solo 1 & 2

Szereposztás: 1-Egyházi Géza/Bot Gábor/Zöld Csaba 2-Török Anna/Simon Boglárka Panna 3-Pásztor Ádám/Héger Tibor 4-Illés Dániel/Sándor Dávid/Jegercsik Csaba 5-Pavletits Béla 6-Sári Éva/Kecskés Tímea/Horváth Mónika 7-Kokas Piroska 8-Umbráth László 9-Szemenyei János/Jenei Gábor 10-1: Mező Márió/Károlyi Krisztián, 2: Táborosi Márk

Dates subject to changes information from vampirokbalja.com