Joanna Wane on the “Dracula spectacular” coming this way.
Gold Coast star and former drag queen James Smart was born to be a vampire — with bling. In Singapore, he played Dracula in Universal Studios’ Monster Rock and was cast as Dracula again for a show in Japan. In Macau, he did an event where he performed as a singing vampire.
While his role as Onyx is more “bloodsucker adjacent” in Dracula’s: The Resurrection Tour, the hit burlesque comedy rock show coming here from Australia, it’s his raunchiest interpretation yet. “My character is a bit edgy and sexy and grungy but with a little sprinkle of glitter and campness on the top,” he says. “The vibe is very horror-inspired, bringing you into the Dracula world. And everyone craves a bit of darkness, don’t they?”
Created in the 1980s with a nod to the Rocky Horror Show vibe (that’s not really about vampires, either), the original Dracula’s theatre restaurant opened in an old warehouse on Melbourne’s Drewery Lane that had been converted into a haunted castle. In 1985, a second Dracula’s opened in Broadbeach, a 10-minute drive from Surfers Paradise.
The Melbourne venue has since closed but Dracula’s has become a Gold Coast institution, running five nights a week with a 500-seat capacity and a full house most weekends. Staff dressed as ghouls roam the grounds, occasionally running amok with chainsaws, and crucified skeletons hang from the outer walls.
A creaking door, marked “Whispering Haemorrhoids Funeral Services”, leads you into the dark, cavernous interior via an old-fashioned ghost train. Zombies loom from the dark and bodies with dismembered limbs drip with blood to a creepy soundtrack of buzzing flies. By the time you get to the underground bar, where every corner is decked out with freak show memorabilia, you’ll definitely be ready for a drink.
Over the past four decades, more than five million people have submitted themselves to the full Dracula’s experience, essentially a naughty, vaudeville-style variety show served up with a three-course meal and novelty cocktails like the signature Blood Bag, a sipper pouch filled with vodka, peach schnapps, apple juice and strawberry liqueur. The wait staff have attitude and hammer-horror names like Cadaver. No vampire fangs, though, because it’s hard to talk, let alone sing, with false teeth.
Two years ago, a “classic hits” stage adaptation rated 15+ went on the road in Australia, featuring a mix of rock music, aerial acrobatics, semi-nudity and some eye-rollingly naff comedy involving singing sperm and a giant puppet penis. A banging cover of the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil is the opening number. “Think Halloween with glitter and sequins mixed with burlesque,” wrote one reviewer. “If you are easily offended, this show is definitely not for you.”
In October, The Resurrection Tour heads to New Zealand for its first international season, opening at Auckland’s Civic Theatre before travelling south to Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill. Bookings are so strong that extra dates have already been added; apparently, Dracula’s on the Gold Coast is particularly popular with Kiwis.
The cast of nine, who’ve spent the year performing together around Australia, includes Vendetta on guitar, Whiskey on drums, two dancers known as the Heart-Attack Twins, aerialists Scott Lazarevich and Emma Goh, comedian Will Rogers (his character, Vlad, does a duet with a vacuum cleaner) and Sydney-based singer and burlesque performer Clara Fable as Viper, who escapes from a gilded cage to perform a sultry striptease and wears glittered nipple pasties.
Luke Newman, who co-created the production alongside his sister-in-law, artistic director Adelaide Clark, says people walk through the door ready to get wild. “This is True Blood, as opposed to Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” he tells Canvas on a behind-the-scenes visit to Dracula’s Gold Coast HQ. “Humans want to bite the vampires as well.”
Luke is the third-generation CEO of what’s remained a family business since it was founded by his grandparents, Tikki and John Newman, in the 1960s. A legendary couple in the entertainment industry, they opened Australia’s first theatre restaurant, Tikki & John’s Music Hall, in Melbourne. At its height, there was a 12-month waiting list. The pair met when they were cast in the same musical — Tikki was a classically trained ballet dancer — and later toured the world as a vaudeville duo. One of their show posters is still up on the wall at Invercargill’s Civic Theatre, where The Resurrection Tour will soon be playing.
John, who’s 93 this year, remains actively involved in developing new acts for Dracula’s, which regularly rolls out a fresh show (the latest release, Menagerie, opens in Broadbeach on August 23). Luke says it was his grandfather’s idea to develop a stage version they could take on the road. For the New Zealand tour, a massive 14-metre truck has been hired to transport everything from the costumes and set designs to a high-speed aerial circus winch. The “bump in” at each venue takes a full day for a crew of 25 people.
Smart, a Gold Coast boy who celebrated his 18th birthday at Dracula’s, says all the performers are encouraged to develop personas that reflect their own style. Onyx, for example, has a taste for chains and leather studs. When time allows, Smart likes to spend a couple of hours transitioning into character, making himself up with full drag queen eyes and blackening his hair and beard. He says the stage show feels like a live rock concert. “But it’s quite rare to go to a rock concert that has acrobatics and then comedy and a bit of burlesque, a bit of gayness. It’s all squeezed in together. Everyone has a mishmash of skills and I think that is what’s so fabulous about it.”
Luke grew up hanging around backstage at Dracula’s in Melbourne, officially joining the payroll full-time when he turned 18. There’s a great photo of him as a toddler sitting with his father on the ghost train when it was first built in the 90s as little more than a plank of wood on wheels. The latest refurbishment, due for completion this month, features slick custom-made props imported from the United States and is its fifth or sixth iteration.
Both Luke and his brother Julian, who’s played guitar on a few shows, met their wives through Dracula’s; so did the company’s production and operations manager, Ricky Craw, a Kiwi who hails from Bluff. Various aunts, uncles and cousins have also been involved through the years. “For me, it’s always just been kind of normal,” says Luke, who took an animatronic head his dad had made to primary school one day for “show and tell” and remembers him coming back from America with a giant latex dragon. “You kind of forget how weird it all is.” If it sounds like your kind of jam, exactly just how weird it is will be something you’ll have fun finding out.
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