Theatre in Review: Blood/Love (Theatre 555)

	Christopher M. Ramirez. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

The vampire musical is back, a genre that seemingly ran its course about twenty years ago but apparently is, you know, undead. The early 2000s saw a rash of them, but Dance of the Vampires, Dracula: The Musical, and Lestat were just so many waystations on the boulevard of broken dreams. Perhaps The Lost Boys, which opens at the Palace in April, will finally break the curse. One thing I know: Blood/Love won't do it.

Entering Theatre 555, one immediately notices that the stage is entirely obscured by fog. Are we in Brigadoon? Far from it. As the haze clears, we meet Valerie Bloodlove, who, in a confusing and hard-to-hear prologue, is established as Satan's runaway bride. Somewhere along the way, however, she picks up a taste for human blood. A musical number takes us down through the centuries, with performers dressed as Renaissance partiers, French revolutionaries, and flappers passing through on the turntable of Jason Ardizzone-West's set. Suddenly, it's 2025, and Val is, her friend Cleo notes, "One thousand years today."

Alas, Val finds eternal life to be enervating. Or, as she puts it, she is "stuck in my head/Talking to the dead/I've done it all/But the thrill is all gone." "Oh, honey, maybe you should talk to someone," Cleo muses, cueing a sequence in which Val pours out her heart in, successively, a therapy session, an AA meeting, and the confession box. The therapist writes a prescription, the AA crowd looks nervous, and the priest runs like a bunny, possibly to catch a screening of The Exorcist.

If Carey Renee Sharpe and Dru DeCaro, responsible for the book, music, and lyrics, played all this for laughs, Blood/Love might provide some amusement. Instead, the action is deadly serious, paced by the kind of earnest power ballads that, these days, earn Pavlovian reactions from the audience. Anyway, Val's problems are just beginning: Hanging out at her favorite club, she falls hard for the tormented rock star Anzick; rather than bite him in the neck, she goes home with him for some steamy sex. In the post-coital afterglow, however, she notices he is wearing The Devil's Diamond. Yes, Anzick has sold his soul to you-know-who. This causes Val to blurt out, "The Devil is my ex!"

Well, that's awkward. As Val stews about making the ultimate sacrifice for her man, everyone onstage is busy singing their heads off. As Anzick notes, he's "a desperate man/With a drastic plan/Or a bitter end/Can you break the hex/Can you take this from my neck?" Val is willing, but, as she recalls, breaking up was hard to do: "Many lifetimes have come and gone/I was tempted and tried and torn/In the shadows where I grew strong/I've been running for so long/Am I running to or running from?" Good question, honey.

Blood/Love works overtime trying to work up a heated, Anne Rice-style atmosphere, an effort betrayed by the overwhelming silliness of the words and music. The leads carry on with straight faces throughout, starting with co-author Sharpe, whose poker-faced Val is hard to read. As Anzick, Christopher M. Ramirez has the best voice in the company, but the character is barely a squiggle; he isn't helped by a ridiculous bit of staging showing the fruits of his ill-gotten success, with crowds of fans avidly proffering Oscars, Tony Awards, and MTV Moon Persons. (Dream on, Anzick.) Zephaniah Divine Wages struts and throws shade as Demetrius, Val's longtime friend, a couturier. (The musical staging by Natalie Malotke, Jonathan Platero, and Oksana Platero, often threatens to become one long fashion parade.) Rocking a bustier and posing imperiously, Demetrius hands out life lessons (ignored by Val) about the dangers of fraternizing with mortals. "People are food, not friends," adds Brooke Simpson as Cleo, sipping daintily on plasma from a plastic bag. She takes the lead in the inevitable vaudeville-style comedy number, "Humans are Boring" -- she should talk -- and gets a memorable exit via a designer drug that causes vampires to vanish in a puff of smoke. (The special effects are by Skylar Fox and Daniel Weissglass.

Hunter Bird's direction keeps the show constantly in motion, mostly letting the actors deadpan their way through the book scenes, marshalling their energies for those big, long-held musical notes. He gets pretty spectacular work from his designers, however. Ardizzone-West's set, a series of concentric boxes, is almost entirely covered in video panels, to which 59 Studio supplies plenty of eye-catching abstract color-and-shape combinations. Japhy Weideman's compelling lighting combines strongly articulated beam arrangements with light curtain effects and bold color washes. (The stage goes red whenever a vampire bites.) Jessica Paz's sound design is wobbly at the beginning, but improves as it goes, although nobody in the cast is particularly devoted to enunciating the lyrics. The costumes, by Alex and Juli Abene, are aggressively fashion-forward for the creatures of the night and dowdy for the souls of the damned, which seems only fair.

By the time Blood/Love reaches its climax, which includes, I think, the harrowing of Hell, it's not all that easy to tell what is going on. We end up where we began, at a set of nuptials in the underworld. When the lights came up, I had to wonder: Did we just see a happy ending? Really, who can say? --David Barbour