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[0:15] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: Ahoy apparitions and aficionados of the after hours. Your dashing Duke of Darkness, Andrew Keenan-Bolger here, beckoning you from the bewitched bowels of my eerie enclave, my dressing room at New World Stages. Congratulations, you've stumbled upon the sixth sinister soiree of Dracula the Podcastula, the official companion podcast of the new off-Broadway play, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. In tonight's tantalizing tableau, we'll pierce the veil of the unknown, seducing secrets from our mischief-making maestro. So, dear listeners, lend me your ears, not your necks, as we waltz through the corridors of Off Broadway's most delightfully dreadful comedy. Wearing the hats of both co-author and director, Gordon's work shines bright across stage and screen.

Recent works include Picasso, starring Antonio Banderas, Most Talkative for NBC Universal, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Geffen Playhouse, Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, directed and co-written with Steve Rosen at the Old Globe. On Broadway, he directed and co-wrote Holiday Inn. In London, he directed Barnum and Guys and Dolls, starring Rebel Wilson, but I know him best as our fearless leader, director and co-writer of Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. Welcome to the Podcastula, Gordon.

[1:41] Gordon Greenberg: Why, thank you, Andrew Keenan-Bolger. I'm so pleased to be here.

[1:44] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: Oh, it's a delight. Gordon, let's dive right in. What intrigued you about the tale of Dracula and made you want to bring it to the stage?

[1:52] Gordon Greenberg: We got a commission. Pretty much. Put it out there. Money. It started there. Um, it's, you know, Steve and I have written so many things and have talked about so many ideas. And I think one of the strengths of us as a writing team is that when somebody gets excited about something we're writing, we lean into it. And we can almost back into what we feel is a promising idea. So for me, I don't need to know exactly what I'm going to do with something, but I do need to know why it connects with me personally, um, and that it has a good chance of actually being produced. Those two things are rare and magical. Not necessarily the connecting with me personally, because I can usually find an in. If somebody tells you that they want to get behind your interpretation of a classic or of any story they have, I feel like the first step is to say, okay, what's in this story that I relate to?

What is the sort of play underneath the play? And when Andrew Cato at the Malt in Florida, who was aware of some of the pieces that Steve and I had written along these lines, stylistically, plays that were told with a small cast playing multiple roles with highly theatrical staging. When he talked about Dracula, we immediately said, I know why we need to do it. One, because it takes itself so darn seriously, that becomes the easiest thing to send up. Um, it is the golden rule of comedy. The more seriously you take something absurd, the funnier it is. And then, furthermore, when we looked into and discovered the actuality of Bram Stoker's life, um, it became clear that he was closeted and queer and close with a lot of literary greats who shared that experience.

Uh, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, etc. He ran a theater in London outside of Covent Garden, uh, the Lyric Theatre where The Lion King has been playing for 75 years. And uh, every time I walk by it, I think about him now. I can imagine that a lot of this was a metaphor for um how he was feeling, and he borrowed some ideas, you know, Dracula's uh multiple residences around London so as not to be discovered, um, is Oscar Wilde's experience. He and Bosie had many apartments because he couldn't be in any one place too long because people would start to catch on and he'd go to prison, which eventually, of course, they did and he did. But uh, there are a lot of, let's say, sexually ambiguous ideas that for the time were terrifically maverick and rule-breaking.

And if you're reading between the lines, they're very clearly there. If you're not looking for them, they kind of blend into this otherworldly atmosphere. But we also wanted to embrace that and pay homage to it. Um, and that's why you're in the show, Andrew.

[4:54] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: But truly, I will say though, that is one of the things that excited me the most. I think even before we started rehearsal, you started sending me articles about like queerness in Dracula, and uh it was something I had never considered when I was auditioning for it. But I think as a queer performer, it like excited me tremendously. And then even from the draft that I read to the draft that we ended up doing, there is just a lot more exploration of the sexuality in it, making it a little bit less on the binary. Will you talk about that at all on how that sort of changed from iteration to iteration?

[5:31] Gordon Greenberg: Absolutely. It I mean, it's something that we embraced more and more, um, especially as we brought the show to New York. My partner is a physician who deals primarily with trans adolescents. Um, and we do talk about uh the kind of continuum of sexuality, of gender, and how they're not necessarily related. And the idea that as we advance as a civilization and can get more granular into how well we treat each other, not necessarily uh by mandate, but because we have the time and and we have the understanding. I think we're in a place where now we can acknowledge nuance in those areas and acknowledge that everyone's a little different. And our Dracula is a little bit queer. Who knows in the end, and really who cares?

Um, but he's open to the moment, and I do believe there's genuine attraction between him and Harker, which is why we further develop that. It was always there as subtext, but we sort of just brought it closer to the surface, and it's fun, and you can tell the whole audience is with us every night. Come on, Hell's Kitchen.

[6:42] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: I love it. Even today I watched the matinee, and I'm not a matinee person, but there is like palpable electricity in the room when that's about to happen, because I don't know that they expect it because he's also simultaneously pursuing your fiancée who is female. That is beautiful and and uh winning and intelligent and charming and all the things. But I think his attraction to her does not preempt him also being attracted to you, which is what's really sort of liberating, just to acknowledge. I know that it's messy for the world to have to get their heads around that, and for some people it's uncomfortable in some parts of the world and even this country, but I celebrate the fact that people are complex and that we can hold more than one idea in our head at a time, and that it's all pretty sexy to live on the edge.

[7:36] Gordon Greenberg: Heck yeah. And who doesn't want to see James make out with multiple cast members of multiple genders? Oh look, it's our postwoman. Honey, you can just knock. It looks like she's brought us some fang mail. I asked our audience to write in with questions for Gordon.

[7:53] Gordon Greenberg: So we have Lila Golden asks, were there any scenes or ideas that didn't make the final cut that you loved? Well, there were a lot of scenes, actually, that we cut. Um we probably cut like a half hour out of the show. Um it's funny because the whole montage at the end, which sort of zips by, used to be five scenes. Um we cut those five scenes, which lasted like 15 to 20 minutes down to about two minutes total. Um and each one of them was delightful, and I loved our jokes and our deep thoughts, but uh we had to kill our darlings uh because sometimes uh economy is the uh soul of wit, or is that brevity? Brevity is the soul of wit. That's what it is. I'll take it. That was our experience on this, so a lot of the time was carving away the things that were not absolutely necessary so that what was there um could have greater resonance and impact.

[8:48] Gordon Greenberg: At Mysterious Fenboy asks, what's more terrifying? A world without coffee or a world without memes? Everything about that question makes me. Definitely coffee. Memes I can live without. 100%. Wait, who is that? Is that you? Did you ask that question? No, no. But it's very Dracula of the Bodcashtlay account. It's very mysterious. But coffee is, I mean. I have some friends who I bet would choose memes. Really? Yeah, probably. They're anti-coffee? Yeah, we just love memes too much. Are they tea drinkers or die coke? They must drink something. They must.

[9:26] Gordon Greenberg: At Jilly Billy Christensen asks, do you believe in the five-second rule? You mean like on the floor? Yeah. Well, this is very germane to our play. Because you know when a page uh of the script falls on the floor? If it's there for more than five seconds, I cut it from the show. That's that's my rule. This is uh, yeah, directing tips with Gordon Greenberg. We we just let the spirits decide what gets the eggs. Exactly. Actually, we were first doing holiday and no, not holiday, and what show is that? Oh, on um uh Happy Days, the Gary Marshall, uh, just one of the greatest humans ever uh to live. We were doing the show, and it was still early, and and we were figuring out who the characters were, particularly in the ensemble, and it was Easter at good speed.

This is pre-Broadway. Um, and so we bought all those little plastic eggs, and I cut up all the ensemble lines and put one in each egg. Oh my god. And had an egg hunt, and I just said, whoever finds it can have the line. Oh my god, that's amazing. So that's a directing tip. That's pretty good. That sounds fun. For old fashioned musicals.

[10:31] Gordon Greenberg: And now, as the moon ascends in our eerie night sky, it's time once again for the vampiral moment of the week. But dear listeners, this isn't just any old auditory chills and thrills. We've got a feast for your eyes that's just dying to be devoured. So flip on over to at Dracula the Podcastula for the visual spectacle that accompanies these ghostly sounds. Few vampire tales have sunk their teeth into recent pop culture, quite like the Twilight series. But let's face it, some of its dialogue completely unhinged. Gordon, as a professional writer and director, can you tell a genuine Twilight quote from one that's let's say been conjured up by me? Welcome to Twilight or Not. I'll dish out a line, and you guess if it's a bona fide Twilight line or a total fabrication.

[11:23] Gordon Greenberg: You say that as if I'd ever seen even a single Twilight movie. Oh well, this is gonna be delicious. But I've seen memes. This is Twilight or not. I'll read a quote and you tell me if it's actually from the Twilight series, or made up by my own twisted mind. Are you ready? I'm ready, although again, caveat that I've never seen or read Twilight. Well, I have seen stills. You're in for a treat. You're like my own personal brand of heroine. That's from Twilight. I've heard that. That's from Twilight, correct. So I got that. That's the low-hanging fruit. Okay. I guess the wolf's out of the bag. That's from Andrew Keenan-Bolger. That's from Twilight. That's an actual quote. That's terrible. It's not great.

[12:11] Gordon Greenberg: When you can live forever, what's a few minutes waiting for a cheeseburger? That's I'm gonna say Twilight because it's so silly, but you want me to think it's you. Okay, no, it's me. No, it's you! It's you really can't tell. You're messing with me. You're messing with my mind. If I had a heartbeat for every time I thought of you, well, I'd be human. I like it. That's Twilight. That is fake. What? Yes, yeah, yeah. Good. You should have you consider fanfiction. It's an off day when someone doesn't tell me how edible I smell. Alright, there have been two of you so far, so that one's gotta be Twilight. That is Twilight. Even a stopped watch. That's right. Twice a day. The most broken. I can't read Bella's mind. It's like she's radio static.

[13:03] Gordon Greenberg: Andrew Keenan-Bolger. That is Andrew Keenan-Bolger, yes. Can a vampire get a brain freeze? Because every time I look into your eyes, my head feels cold. Twilight? No, that's fake. Oh did you read when you say fake you mean you wrote? Yeah, I read this. Yeah. It's good. Thanks, thanks. Or or bad. Actually, it's horrible. Oh, yeah. Is there a difference? Stop trying to take your clothes off. It might be too late for my soul, but I will protect yours. That's definitely Twilight. That's definitely Twilight. Yeah. Oh, yeah. In a world of werewolves and vampires, why is high school the scariest part? I love that quote, so whoever wrote it is a genius. Andrew Keenan-Bolger. Did you write that? Wait, that's a book. I'm not even kidding. There we go. There we go. That's the first that's the opening line of your salvo.

[13:54] Gordon Greenberg: Alright, and last one. And so the lion fell in love with a lamb. What a stupid lamb. What a sick, masochistic lion. Twilight. That's total at twilight. Now that's what I call dialogue. Well, Dad Gordon. I can't wait for your next YA novel. I know all about it. Amazing, amazing.

[14:18] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: All right, goblins and ghouls. Our nightly dalliance with the undead draws to a close as we wrap up this episode of Dracula the Podcastula. Enormous kudos to the glorious Gordon Greenberg for haunting the halls with us tonight. For those eager to unravel more of Gordon's mysteries, and believe me, there's many. Haunt him on social media at Gordon Greenberg. Now don't lose track of me in the fog. You can always hear my chilling whispers at Keenan-Bolger, our deathly delightful show at Dracula Comedy, and of course the podcast at Dracula the Podcastula. If our macabre musings tonight sent a shiver down your spine or made your heart, if you have one, skip a beat. Remember to like, share, and subscribe.

Those reviews are our lifeblood, pun intended. So let them flow freely. Hungry for an encore of eerie, float on over to Dracula Comedy.com to secure a seat at our dark banquet. Rest easy, my nocturnal friends. For while the night may seem still, it won't be long before we once again summon you from your crypts for another dance in the dark. Until then, see you in the shadows.

[15:26] Andrew Keenan-Bolger: If you've made it this far in the episode, thanks again for listening. It must mean that unlike Dracula themselves, this doesn't suck, and you must enjoy my biting humor. Make sure to share this with your friends and to leave a five-star review. Until next time.