TT: The kids are all wrong

I spent the first night of 2011 seeing a very bad off-Broadway revival of Dracula for The Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt from today’s review.
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How is it that vampires and zombies (not to mention serial killers, their postmodern cousins) are so hot nowadays? No doubt our undiminished interest in the blood-suckers and flesh-eaters among us says something profound, disturbing and transgressive about American culture, but I’m damned if I know what it is, perhaps because I hopped off that particular train when “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” closed up shop. I have yet to see a single installment of “Twilight,” “True Blood” or “The Vampire Diaries,” nor do I plan to do so anytime soon. I did, however, snag a ticket to the new Off-Broadway “Dracula,” partly because the ever-excellent George Hearn is playing Van Helsing, Buffy’s spiritual great-grandfather, and partly because Thora Birch, who was so fine in “Ghost World” and “American Beauty,” was supposed to play Lucy Seward, the chief recipient of the sanguinary favors of the Transylvanian count (Michel Altieri).
Ms. Birch, however, got canned when the show was in rehearsal and has since been replaced by Emily Bridges, her understudy. Now that I’ve seen the play she left behind, I incline to think that she got lucky, for this “Dracula” is a limply staged, unconvincingly acted mess….
You won’t have any trouble figuring out the high concept of this production: Except for Mr. Hearn and Timothy Jerome, who plays Lucy’s father, everyone in the case is very young and mostly very pretty. The goal, I assume, is to appeal to the teen-and-tween set, but the producers have neglected to hire any familiar faces and favored looks over experience. As a result, some of the performances are ludicrously amateurish. I won’t name any names–Paul Alexander, the show’s near-unknown, painfully ungifted director, may be the guilty party here–but I heard the chilling sound of unintended laughter at several points in the second act….
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Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the 1979 film version of Dracula, starring Frank Langella: