Backstage: An Evening with Dracula: LIVE Shorts

"An Evening with Dracula," LIVE from the NYPL Lite, October 30, 2008. Beware of "The New Annotated Dracula!" After his "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes," Leslie Klinger returns with a daring conceit: the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Klingers research took him to the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, where Stokers notes are housed, and to Seattle to spend two days with the guarded manuscript (Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen is the owner). He points out errors and inconsistencies in the narrative that reveal the truth: that Stoker covered up the real story of the Harkers travels and the real location of Castle Dracula and invented Draculas supposed death. Be prepared on the eve of Halloween to travel through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as the graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania as Klinger, the superb literary detective, investigates the multifarious subtexts of the original narrative—from the masochistic to the necrophilic. Die-hard Dracula fans will not be disappointed by the vampire-prince. The actress Zoe Caldwell will do a reading.