Things get bloody at Harlequin with Orson Welles’ radio version of ‘Dracula’

Harlequin Productions wraps up its fall run of online “radio theater” with Orson Welles’ 1938 version of “Dracula” running nightly through Oct. 31.

“It’s got that Halloween dark fun to it without being serious enough to affect us on an emotional level, considering everything that’s going on in the world,” said director Corey McDaniel. “With the election and the pandemic, people are not wanting to be depressed any further than they already are.”

Unlike the other shows in the six-week audio series — all of which the company had planned to produce on stage over the past seven months — Welles’ “Dracula” was written for the radio.

“I felt really strongly that I wanted to direct an actual radio play script,” McDaniel of Seattle told The Olympian. “Plays are written to be visual vehicles, and I don’t know that they always translate well to the radio.

“I did a deep dive into the radio plays out there that might fit this season,” he added. “I found this one, and I loved it.”

Welles adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel was the first episode in CBS Radio’s “The Mercury Theatre on the Air,” a series that also included the legendary “War of the Worlds.”

Welles was just 23 when he produced, directed and starred in “Dracula,” and the production continues to inspire admiration today.

“Welles and the Mercury Theatre developed innovative techniques that raised the bar for radio storytelling,” Jenni Page-White wrote last month on the website of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, which is also producing an audio version of Welles’ “Dracula.” She summed up Welles’ production as “a breathless hour of taut storytelling.”

McDaniel — who directed 2019’s “I Ought to Be in Pictures” and January’s “Noises Off,” and starred in 2018’s “I Am My Own Wife,” all at Harlequin — also works as a voiceover artist, and he chose to cast several other voiceover artists, including Harlequin regular Marianna de Fazio.

“When you remove the visual sense, the auditory sense becomes much stronger and much more acute,” he said. “It requires actors to be much more specific in conveying what they are feeling through their voices.”

The radio-style shows, streaming over the internet, have other challenges.

“Everyone involved is doing this work from their own home,” artistic director Aaron Lamb said Saturday while introducing the final performance of Harlequin’s previous show, “Snow in Midsummer.” “We’re doing this work together but we’re doing it completely remotely. It’s a real technological feat.”

It seems that it’s also a feat to keep audiences engaged online. Though the shows were offered free, requests for tickets have dropped, Lamb told The Olympian, with only 50 percent of available tickets claimed in recent weeks compared to 90 percent for the first show, “The Highest Tide,” based on the novel by Olympia’s Jim Lynch.

“Attendance was pretty good at the beginning,” Lamb said, “but we’re seeing what I think can only be described as fatigue.”

Donations have slowed, too, he said. The cost of royalties and pay for cast and crew for the six shows is about $25,000, and as of Tuesday, audience members had donated just over $14,000.

Plans for future online shows could also be complicated by a battle between the Actors’ Equity Association, which represents stage actors and stage managers, and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Lamb said. The unions are at odds over which should represent actors whose work is streaming on the internet.

Despite all that, Harlequin aims to continue producing theater online until it’s safe for casts, crews and audiences to return to the State Theater.

“While there are still a lot of unknowns, we do have some exciting opportunities in the works,” Lamb said before Sunday’s performance of “Dracula.”

‘Dracula’

• What: Harlequin Productions wraps up its mini season of live-streamed radio-style shows with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
• When: 7:30 p.m. daily through Saturday, Oct. 31
• Tickets: Free, with donations appreciated. Reservations are needed, as the capacity for each performance is limited to the size of the theater (212 seats).
• More information: https://harlequinproductions.org/radio/

This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 5:45 AM.