Last night we went to see the Colorado Ballet perform Dracula. We thought about seeing it on Halloween night but decided it would be better to see a Saturday night performance.

The show starts out wonderfully creepy, all done behind a sheer screen to give it this great eeriness. In the first act (of 3) there is a wonderful scene where they are paying tribute to something (I can’t remember exactly what). The music and dance in this scene are completely mesmerizing (the clarinet player in the orchestra was simply amazing). The first act was rather short at just over 30 minutes (which was surprising to me) but was a great beginning.

When the second act begins all of a sudden you feel like you’re not watching Dracula anymore, but rather a ball room dancing seen from the 1800′s. Gone is all the creepiness, now everything is bright and cheery. Huh? This is Dracula right? Honestly it completely fell apart here and totally lost me. The entire second act was completely pointless and in my mind did absolutely nothing for the story at all. It was a total sleeper (I did stay awake though).

Fortunately the third act gets back to Dracula once again. The final scene is good, but nothing nearly as great as the first act. It does pick itself back up, but given how wonderfully it started we left disappointed. The bright notes to the entire show were the dancing was just amazing (I still don’t get how the ballerinas stand on their toes like that!), the sets were wonderful and really added to the show, the music was fantastic (it was so nice to have a live orchestra for this one, something none of the other Colorado Ballet’s we’ve seen had). The lighting was also superb, and other than the happy-day Act 2 it was totally creepy. All in all it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t wonderful either, which honestly is something I’ve come to expect from shows like this.