Everybody loves Dracula.
That fact is surely somewhere among the vampire’s long list of powers, along with undead immortality and turning into bats or mist.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel “Dracula” launched an entire fictional subgenre, and the story itself has been adapted a zillion times in every medium. It’s proven popular on the stage, too, and the same weekend that Theatre Lunatico’s production of “Dracula” closes in Berkeley, another production opens at Hayward’s Douglas Morrisson Theatre.
This is a different stage adaptation of Stoker’s novel, however. While Lunatico used the 1996 Steven Dietz play as its text, DMT goes way back to the 1924 adaptation by Irish actor Hamilton Deane, radically revised for Broadway in 1927 by John L. Balderston. Deane had worked for the same London theater company for which Stoker had been the business manager when he wrote the novel, and it was in the Broadway production of this Deane-Balderston play that Bela Lugosi first played Count Dracula.
Directed by Kendall Tieck with music by brother Donald Tieck, the DMT “Dracula” stars Kyle Goldman, who recently played a criminal resembling Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster in “Arsenic and Old Lace” at the same theater.
Details: Nov. 15- Dec. 2; Douglas Morrisson Theatre, Hayward; $10-$29; 510-881-6777, www.dmtonline.org