“They are a chance to give my actors a chance to stretch their muscles – and get paid," she said. “Trifles, “Dracula” and a holiday offering yet to be announced are not only bringing original programming to culturally starved audiences. Which is just one reason Artistic Director of Plays Lynne Collins pivoted to a fall season of radio plays. What I don’t think everyone understands is that actors schedule jobs nine months in advance, and they do so largely by trading on their name and the momentum of their career. “And now I can feel my five-year plan suddenly starting to fall apart as well. “I feel the concussive effects of having my one-year plan destroyed,” he said. The company had 10 more weeks of guaranteed work coming up before the shutdown threw the world into a chaos that to this day still has no bottom.
(Before COVID) production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – one of three Arvada Center plays stopped in their tracks by the coronavirus.Īndrews considers employment in the Arvada Center’s seasonal acting company to be the best and most stable employment any Colorado actor can have. For his own radio-play adaptation, Andrews saw great opportunity in pushing the story “into a new and very theatrical medium,” he said, which is where his original music and the sound come in.Īndrews, also an accomplished photographer and filmmaker, branched into orchestration earlier this year by contributing two songs for Director Emily Van Fleet’s B.C. “Dracula” has occupied space in his cerebellum since he had the opportunity to perform a different one-man adaptation of the story in 2013. (And, did you know? To his dying day, Stoker, pictured at right, claimed all of this was all based on a true story.)Īndrews is a Denver native who graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and the University of Colorado Boulder before earning his master’s degree at the University of Missouri Kansas City. In Part 2, when Dracula is loosed upon England, the story turns into a Gothic nightmare as as a determined group of friends that literary scholars often refer to as the “gang of light” battle the ancient evil that threatens the world. Part 1 is Jonathan making is way to Dracula’s castle and getting ensnared in the Count's web. (And, of course, can change into a bat at will.) It also focuses on young attorney Jonathan Harker, who travels to Transylvania to close a real-estate deal – which opens the vault for Harker's wife, Mina, and the innocent Lucy to become easy prey for the bat man.Īndrews’ play is broken into two distinct segments. Stoker’s antihero is a mysterious and unnerving Eastern European aristocrat intent on expanding his territory across the continent. Stoker’s novel is a harrowing character study not only of the centuries-old undead vampire but also his chasers. “But as a one-man radio play, it works perfectly.” News: Denver Center announces $4 million 'Recovery Fund' “That does not play well for a piece of live ensemble theater,” Andrews added. The novel takes the form of an epistolary tale, which means it is primarily told in the form of letters and journal entries. “The story of Dracula gets presented in many different ways, but the actual source novel rarely gets told because it is so hard to tell as written,” said Andrews, who has been a member of the Arvada Center’s Black Box Repertory Theatre acting company since 2017. But it is not, he promises, a mere audio-book version of the novel. Andrews thinks this is probably the most faithful adaptation of “Dracula” you'll find anywhere. Everything from Bela Lugosi’s genre-defining 1931 film portrayal to the popcorn “ Twilight Saga” film anthology to the “ Scooby-Doo!” cartoon gang has Stoker’s novel in its DNA.Īndrews’ one-hour radio play, “Dracula,” launched today and will remain available on the Arvada Center’s web site as an audio Halloween snack though November 1. When the world took to sheltered isolation following the COVID shutdown, Andrews took to the isolation of his basement, where he wrote, composed, performed and recorded his new, one-man audio adaptation of Stoker’s 1897 novel that lives on as one of the most enduring pop-culture influences of all time. In the midst of this most strange of worlds, Arvada Center actor Zachary Andrews sought escape in an even stranger one: Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror novel “ Dracula,” the archetypical vampire story about the notorious Transylvanian count who turned human necks into Halloween candy. 'I am trying to push the limits of what I can do to your idea of storytelling with sound'
AVAILABLE NOW: ZACHARY ANDREWS TAKES ONE-MAN BITE OUT OF 'DRACULA'
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