Dracula appears at the elongated Gothic window, his blood-red eyes burning in the darkness. A recumbent Lucy, Pre-Raphaelite hair and nightgown both tantalizingly loosened, lies on the bed inviting seduction and damnation. The vampire descends, rips open his shirt to reveal a rippling physique and takes the young woman in his arms. Their inevitable consummation is carnal, fatal. And the temperature in the Stratford Festival's Avon Theatre rises about 20 degrees.
This is a performance of Dracula like no other. No capes. No bats. No cobwebs. No camp -- and it's a new Canadian musical to boot, with book and lyrics by Richard Ouzounian and music by Marek Norman. As played by Juan Chioran, Bram Stoker's undead hero is entirely evil yet utterly alluring. In his black, double-breasted trench coat and waist-length black hair, this Dracula is an irresistible force of darkness.
In real life, Chioran is hardly the epitome of evil. But he is a nearly unique creature in Canadian theatre. Aside from Brent Carver, it's difficult to name another performer who is as adept and accomplished at doing Shakespeare as he is at musical theatre.
For Chioran is also appearing in Stratford this season as another very different spiritual being -- Oberon, the king of the fairies, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In a blue-green bodysuit practically spray-painted to his long-limbed frame, Chioran's Oberon towers over the scurrying denizens of fairyland, a column of stillness intoning: "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine."
"He's in a very small handful of actors in this country who not only have really good vocal equipment but also are serious actors," says Ouzounian, who is also directing Dracula. "There aren't a lot of people you can think of who could play Oberon and sing an incredibly difficult musical like Dracula at the same time."
In many ways, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Dracula are a perfect pair of contrasting shows to open the 1999 season of the Stratford Festival. Dream is all lightness and laughter, a romp of fairies, fools and lovers in an enchanted wood. Dracula, conversely, is an exploration of the dark side of passion and the promise of immortality. One is filled with lyric Elizabethan poetry; one is a contemporary lyric chamber opera. To have found one actor to bridge these two worlds is a stroke of great fortune indeed.
After a raucous preview performance of Dream attended by several busloads of Michigan high-school students, I sit in a backstage office waiting for Chioran who is in his dressing room, changing out of his tights and scrubbing off the blue makeup. Surprisingly quickly, he bounds into the room with a hello that makes the walls echo. He is energetic, handsome and, at six-foot-three, shockingly tall. With his dark hair, Latin features and elongated build, it's rather like speaking to an El Greco painting.
I compliment him on how much the students seemed to enjoy the matinee performance and Chioran glows. "The kids have not been restless once!" he says. "It's fabulous. They loved the mechanicals today. They loved the play within a play. I was watching it backstage on the screen, and Brian [Bedford as Nick Bottom] and those guys just took it to another level."
This year, Chioran shares the stage with his girlfriend, Jacklyn Francis. Now in her third season at Stratford, Francis plays a fairy named Moth in Dream and understudies Seana McKenna as Titania, the fairy queen. "And she's got a great part in Pride and Prejudice," Chioran says proudly. "She plays a nasty bitch and gets to wear expensive frocks and make snide remarks. She loves that."
Asked about his background, Chioran, 35, responds with a laugh. "I'm a mongrel," he says. "I was born in Argentina, my heritage is kind of Italian and my last name [pronounced kee-OR-an] is Romanian."
Chioran's parents emigrated from their native Italy to South America during the Second World War. In 1975, when Chioran was 12, his family became increasingly uncomfortable with the political climate of Argentina and relocated to Canada. "They had been through one war already," he says. "The other arm of the family that emigrated from Italy settled in Canada. So, Italians being very family-oriented, they just brought us all up here."
When he lets down his guard, Chioran's crazy quilt extraction reveals itself in his singularly remarkable everyday speaking voice -- a mid-Canadian accent with round Shakespearian vowels pinging off his hard palate, intermingled with melodious Spanish consonants. Of course, you only hear it when he's not self-mockingly declaiming like a master thespian or engaging in deft celebrity impersonations.
After graduating from high school, Chioran studied acting for two years at York University in Toronto but was an uninspired and lacklustre student. "They kicked me out," he admits, but quickly adds, "not that I would have stayed if they had wanted me." Shortly afterward, he was accepted to the theatre school at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he spent five years "eating, shitting and sleeping theatre. It's exactly what I needed. I became very disciplined and I did very well."
He came to Stratford 12 years ago as a young actor playing small parts and understudying. Eventually, he worked his way up through the company into larger roles.
Very early in Chioran's career, Ouzounian directed him in a production of The Three Musketeers and remembers being impressed with him from the beginning. "He walked onstage during that first preview and I noticed that people automatically looked at him," Ouzounian says. "It's a wonderful quality. There's nothing you can do to learn it or buy it. You either have it or you don't -- and he has it."
After five seasons at Stratford, Chioran decided to take some time off to pursue other roles. On television and film, he appeared in Traders, Psi Factor, F/X, Sinbad, and E.N.G. His opera credits include tenor roles in Tosca, Carmen, Die Fledermaus and (interestingly enough) Der Vampyr. He has been seen in dramatic parts at the Citadel Theatre, Canadian Stage Company, and the Manhattan Theatre Club, and he can be heard as the voice of Sir Loungealot in the animated series Blazing Dragons on Teletoon.
In 1995, Chioran spent six months on Broadway in Kiss of the Spider Woman, then followed that with two years in the Spider Woman national touring company, winning major awards in Los Angeles and Chicago for his portrayal of Molina. "In the United States, the audiences adore actors. They flock to the stage door and you're swamped. You kind of get used to that attention. Here in Canada, it's a very different ball game," he says half-jokingly. "Over here, we're just slightly above prostitution."
Last season, Chioran returned to Stratford as the King of Bohemia in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Cervantes/Don Quixote in the triumphant production of Man of La Mancha. Critics hailed his performance of Don Quixote as "powerful, hypnotic, elegant, and rapier-thin," although they had little idea that Chioran's thinness was a by-product of the role.
"La Mancha was incredibly gruelling because I made him really out there, insane and hugely physical. I had the hat, the armour and the lance and we played it five times a week [plus all the performances of The Winter's Tale.] By the end of the season, I had lost 15 pounds. They had to take in my pants every second week." Even with the strain, Chioran considers Man of La Mancha his favourite play so far at Stratford and would like to try it again in another 10 years.
With Dracula and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Chioran seems well on his way to another banner year at Stratford. This season (which continues through Nov. 7) has a playbill that also includes productions of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Richard II, the musical West Side Story, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal, an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as well a new Canadian play by David Young about pianist Glenn Gould entitled Glenn.
For the 100 actors, 60 artistic personnel and hundreds of artisans in the workshops, the festival is an exciting yet exhausting nine months. So far, ticket sales are up more than 12% over this time last season, and next year the festival is planning extra productions and events to mark the new millennium. More is planned to celebrate Stratford's 50th anniversary in 2002.
"There are so many things to worry about," Ouzounian admits, "but worrying about the way Dracula's going to be played isn't one of them. It's in Juan's hands. And they're extremely capable hands to be in."