Nearly half a century after co-starring in ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’ alongside fiancee Sharon Tate, director Roman Polanski is adapting the musical version of his film for the Paris stage<br /><br />First performed in 1997 in Vienna, ‘Dance of the Vampires’ has since traveled the world. <br /><br />Eighty-one-year old Polanski hopes this French adaptation will boost Paris’ dreary musical theatre scene: “Vampires are becoming popular in last few years, but also the musical, somehow the musical started functioning in France. And now we have a lot of them. In the period when we wanted to bring it here there were few companies that tried to stage musicals and they were total disasters,” he says. <br /><br />The musical was originally written in German by world-renowned lyricist Michael Kunze and features music by US composer and Grammy-award winning producer Jim Steinman. Polanski himself says the translation into French was a rather tricky affair: “I was a bit afraid of France because the French language does not translate well… English is good for singing, German, French not so much… but when I saw the first text in French, I realised that it is possible here… And we’ll see.” <br /><br />Polanski hopes his musical, which flopped on Broadway, will meet the same success in France as it did in central Europe. <br /><br />‘Dance of the Vampires’ is on now at Paris’ Mogador theatre.
