'Dracula the Musical': Vampire gets hunkier

"After a few decades, everyone you know will be dead."- Edward Cullen, vampire love interest in "Twilight."

Bram Stoker never envisioned his greatest literary invention as a matinee idol - much less a teen idol.

Although his Dracula grew younger whenever he scarfed down his favorite energy drink - warm, viscous and blood red - the 500-year-old warlord with the Fu Manchu mustache was never what you'd call attractive. In his 1897 novel, Stoker created a Dracula who was more repellent than magnetic - a vampire with halitosis and hairy palms.

No, he wouldn't be played by Robert Pattinson.

But the Dracula Jeffrey Sanzel brings to the stage in tomorrow's opening of "Dracula the Musical" is a hunk. Dark, brooding and handsomely virile in the person of Jon Rivera. And he attracts groupies - a trio of winsome vampirettes.

"This is a very sexually charged Dracula," says Sanzel, who directs the show for Port Jefferson's Theatre Three. "The novel was sort of borderline pornography for the late Victorian period. But Dracula himself - not so much."

But when Frank Wildhorn wrote his musical score, he adopted modern notions of Dracula as a seducer. If he'd waited a few years to bring it to Broadway, "Dracula the Musical" might have succeeded. It ran 157 performances in 2004 - before the latest, and hottest, vampire incarnations: "Twilight" and "True Blood."

THE PHONETIC DRACULA

Lon Chaney was cast in the title role of the first "Dracula" film - it's the one to blame for the vampire cliches - coffins, bats, satin capes. But when Chaney died suddenly of cancer, the role went to Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, who spoke very little English. He learned the script phonetically. For generations, actors played the bloodthirsty count with a certain arched speech impediment.

21ST CENTURY VAMP-HUNKS

One of the mythology breakthroughs in HBO's "True Blood" is that vampires no longer need to kill for blood nourishment. They'll even drink it chilled - like beer. So we're more inclined to identify with Anna Paquin when she falls for a fancy bad boy of the bayou (Stephen Moyer). Meanwhile, Stephenie Meyer hit a literary jackpot that may rival J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" franchise with her chaste tales of simmering romance involving a teen beauty (Kristen Stewart in the films) and rival suitors - vampire Pattinson and werewolf Taylor Lautner.

DRAC, THE LOVER

"That's the appeal we're going for here. Sexy vampires," says Sanzel. "After all, in the original, Dracula falls in love." And those three vampire girls? "A little something for the tired businessman in our audience," Sanzel adds with a smile.
 

WHAT Long Island premiere of "Dracula the Musical"

WHEN | WHERE Saturday night at 8, Sunday at 3 p.m., through Oct. 30, at Theatre Three, 412 Main St., Port Jefferson

INFO $14 to $28; theatrethree.com, 631-928-9100