Old Blood, New Voices: Source material
We developed this musical from the original manuscript transcription. It took seven months from conception to showcase.
Original Manuscript
This is Boucicault’s hand in the original manuscript:
Prompter’s Copy
The Wallack script is by his prompter/scribe TH Edmonds:
New York Public Library Copy
It also looks to be Edmonds’s hand as is
Lord Chamberlain’s Copy
Almost fifty years before Bram Stoker penned Dracula, Dion Boucicault staged The Vampire: A Phantasm in Three Dramas, a three-act play that thrilled London audiences. Queen Victoria saw it twice at the Princess Theatre. The production boasted innovations of stagecraft and dramatic composition, to say nothing of the mesmerizing performance of Boucicault as the titular creature. The Royal Collection contains the Queen’s sketches of Boucicault and her commissioned portrait of him as the Vampire in his Puritan garb. After The Vampire closed, Boucicault moved to the United States and revised his play, staging a two-act version renamed The Phantom in 1856. Since then, the melodrama has languished in relative obscurity, with no published edition nor critical commentary since the mid-nineteenth century.
Boucicault’s original handwritten script provides the basis for this first full edition of his innovative tour de force. Similarly, a manuscript of The Phantom, updated by Boucicault for an 1873 production, offers audiences a new version of this influential play. The Vampire and The Phantom can now take their proper place in the lineage of vampire literature that began with John William Polidori and continues to this day.
Story and Duration
The Vampire is a two-act musical that runs in under two hours with one intermission. The setting is a haunted castle designed to change over time from the 1660s to the 1760s and finally to the 1860s.
Act I opens in a village pub where lords and ladies have paused on their way to the castle as they learn about the danger that awaits them. Act II ends with paintings of the vampire’s victims coming to life in the castle hall. It ends with a Faustian finale as the vampire is taken into the crypt by his previous victims. Below are the summaries of the three original acts. Our new musical version has one intermission and runs less than two hours.
