State Street Ballet’s Dracula premiere earns a standing ovation

By Tom Whitfield

State Street Ballet’s sold-out world premiere of Dracula: A Dark Shadow ended with a screaming, standing ovation, and the applause continued after the curtain fell, according to the production review.

The account credits the result to a close collaboration among Nicolas Blanc’s choreography, Jack Mehler’s sets, Ben-Oni Cortes’s costumes, Philip Glass’s score, the Kronos Quartet and State Street Ballet’s dancers.

The review described Blanc’s neoclassical choreography as precisely matched to Glass’s music. Throws, catches and sudden drops brought the speed and confidence of pairs figure skating into ballet, while the production maintained an intimate and sexually charged relationship between Dracula and his male and female victims.

How Glass and the live quartet drove the staging

The Kronos Quartet, for whom Glass originally wrote the score, performed in costume above the stage. The review compared its elevated position to another dimension and said it gave the story ferocious urgency.

Blanc said: “It gives you the truth to narrate the story, and to feel almost physically speaking what I should choreograph on that music.”

The reviewer said the staging amplified an earlier preview by “1,000-fold.” That was a rhetorical flourish rather than a measured increase, but it captured the conviction running through the review. Mehler’s magical sets and Cortes’s elaborate but danceable costumes had joined the choreography, music and acting as one production.

How the dancers prepared for Dracula

Preparation began the previous summer with weekly international “dancer Dracula book club” sessions on Zoom. Dr. Nicole Callahan, State Street Ballet’s board president and a former English professor at Columbia University, led the seminars.

Callahan said the group included “dancers all over the U.S., in Sicily and Japan, and Nicolas in France.” She added: “We met weekly on Zoom to discuss two or three chapters of the book at a time, so that the dancers could be familiar with the story, but also aware of the changes Nic and I made in the adaptation for the ballet.”

Blanc said: “I loved diving into the psychology of each character, understanding their motivation and ways of interacting with each other.”

What did the cast make of the roles?

The review described a two-act progression from innocence and foreboding in Act I to outright terror in Act II. Six dancers carried the central roles:

• Jonathan Harker — Ethan Ahuero: Harker begins frightened by wolves and the vampire brides, then shares a sexual pas de deux with Dracula. In Act II, he returns to London, finds Lucy dead and fights Dracula to recover Mina. He kills Dracula, then stares at his blood-stained hands.
• Lucy — Saori Yamashita: A cheerful Lucy becomes Dracula’s victim in a pas de deux of spectacular lifts and rolling floorwork. The review compared Saori Yamashita’s transformation from living woman to terrifying undead figure with the Odette/Odile challenge in Swan Lake.
• Mina — Maria Rita Rapisarda: Jonathan’s fiancée and Lucy’s friend, Mina unravels after learning of Lucy’s death. Dracula finds her vulnerable, tricks her into tasting his blood and confronts her through daring lifts and a chase. Rapisarda played her conflict between attraction and revulsion before Mina broke free.
• Renfield — Paul Rivard: Act I places him in a sensual, frightening pas de deux with Dracula. Although Dracula never bites him, Renfield goes mad. In Act II, Rivard plays an insect-eating asylum inmate whose portrayal of pitiful insanity, according to the review, reached the audience.
• Dr. Van Helsing — Ryan Lenkey: A scholar interested in the mind, Van Helsing appears in a brief duet with a skull. His attempts to cure Renfield and Lucy and save Mina fail before he kills the vampire brides and other undead. Lenkey said: “[Van Helsing] knows exactly how dangerous Dracula is, and he walks toward that danger anyway.”
• Count Dracula — Tigran Sargsyan: The review called Sargsyan a principal dancer who demonstrated mastery of both technique and drama. It described his Dracula as a controlled nobleman with understated evil and subtle sexual appeal, then found equal terror and fear in the performance during the final scenes.

The final battle was likened to a relentless roller coaster. The vampire brides and ghouls entered with Lucy among them, the wolves reappeared and Dracula ran through the fray. Sargsyan jumped so high that he appeared to fly across the stage, and the audience cheered.

The closing image remained deliberately uncertain. Dracula lay alone before a tall, wolf-headed figure in a long black hooded robe crossed the stage. The review left open whether the figure personified death or represented Dracula’s wolf spirit, allowing the immortal Dracula to survive.

What does the premiere change for State Street Ballet?

For audiences, the premiere provides a new staging of Glass’s score with live musicians, elaborate design and unusually close attention to the novel. For the company, it demonstrates a research process that reached beyond its dancers and included international participation. The sold-out theater and prolonged applause establish a strong reception, but they do not amount to a measured box-office result or a broader consensus.

The account gives no exact premiere date, venue name, running time, ticket prices or comparative audience data. It directs readers to statestreetballet.com for current performance information.

Artistic director Megan Phillip said: “I’m so proud of everyone involved in this ballet. Nic was such a joy to have here. He will definitely be back; we are already working on possible future projects!” The evidence supports a continuing collaboration between Blanc and State Street Ballet, not an announced Dracula revival.