Dance Of The Vampires

Michael Kunze has long been a big fan of Roman Polanski’s famous movie from the 1960s — Dance of the Vam­pires. He became fas­ci­nated by the idea of cre­at­ing a drama musi­cal with a story com­pletely dif­fer­ent from his pre­vi­ous work, ELISABETH.

Michael wanted to cre­ate a musi­cal full of irony, a drama that takes itself not too seri­ously, either. He met with Polan­ski in Paris and pro­posed his con­cept. The great direc­tor was elated…he even com­mit­ted to tak­ing the helm of this project.

Using the char­ac­ters of the movie, Dr. Kunze wrote a brand-new Eng­lish libretto apply­ing his suc­cess­ful orig­i­nal struc­ture of a dra­matic musi­cal story. He pre­sented it to the Amer­i­can hit-composer Jim Stein­man who agreed to craft the score.

In Octo­ber 1997, a Ger­man ver­sion pre­miered at the Raimund The­ater in Vienna. The show con­tin­ued to play in front of enthu­si­as­tic audi­ences in Stuttgart, Ham­burg, Berlin, and later on even in Poland, Hun­gary, and Tokyo.

When DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES was pre­pared for a Broad­way pro­duc­tion, some­thing truly sad hap­pened and the show flopped after only a short run. Watch Michael’s com­ment in the fol­low­ing video…