Photo: Claude Haché

We go see plays for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it’s to take refuge from the real world in fiction. Other times, it’s to laugh or cry. Still other times, we seek to be blown away, gutted, stung by a story and left to pick up the pieces, one by one, for ourselves. Coupled with good directing and acting, these are the latter are stories that stay with us indefinitely, make us question what we think, and burrow themselves into our very being. John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God is just one such story and, under Marc-André Charron’s direction, 9th Hour theatre’s production lives up to the story’s potential.

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When a stage musical begins as a movie, it is often a challenge to match audience expectations in the new format. This is even more so when the original version was an award-winning animated feature film. Yet, despite the restrictions that transferring the 1991 movie to the stage imposes, the 1994 stage version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast remains popular with audiences.

The touring production now in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre is glitzy, brash and bubbly. Complete with a mass of curlicues and 3-D effects, the set pieces evoke a children’s storybook—appropriately, as Beauty and the Beast began as a fairy tale.

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The myth of various forms of “undead” creatures, who survive by feeding on their victims’ blood, has existed for millennia. The word “vampire” was first used in English literature early in the 18^th century. Early in the next century, John Polidori was frequently credited with developing the genre in his 1819 novella, The Vampyre. But it was Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror novel, Dracula, that has left the most enduring mark on tales of the undead since its publication in 1897.

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The best known stage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the one originally written in 1924 by Irish actor and playwright Hamilton Deane and later revised by John Balderston. It has enjoyed a long and productive life and, as recently as 1977, received a successful New York revival starring Frank Langella as Western culture’s most famous vampire.

Even so, one can still make a case for a made-in-Canada version. The Death of Dracula, by the late Edmonton playwright, Warren Graves, is a deftly structured piece of theatre and in some ways more lively and less creaky than the Deane-Balderston adaptation. And its considerable virtues are often evident in Jo-Ann McCabe’s production for Ottawa’s Phoenix Players.

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