Dracula

A gala that turned into a payroll

The organisation behind this Dracula started as a one-off concert. Ballet International Gala staged its first event in Brisbane on 25 and 26 June 2021 with Brisbane Symphony Orchestra, assembled by three people with no prior production credits: dancers Joel Burke and Beck Phillips, both 22 at the time, and entertainment lawyer Khalid Tarabay, then 35. The gala became an annual fixture, reaching its sixth edition at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in 2025.

Out of it grew BIG Live, a producing company that now keeps 25 dancers in full-time work and takes no government funding. Tarabay runs it as executive director; Burke is artistic director and choreographer, and still dances principal roles in his own pieces. The stated purpose is blunt enough: long-term paid employment for Australian dancers outside the subsidised system, paid for by ticket sales rather than grants. United Airlines is the principal partner, and the company sells itself on scale and commerciality rather than on curatorial prestige.

The numbers it publishes are claims rather than audited figures, but they are specific. BIG Live says it expects to sell more than 400,000 tickets across its 2026 productions, with more than 200,000 of those for Dracula's international touring alone, and describes itself as the most attended ballet company in Australia and New Zealand.

Not an adaptation — a rewrite

Dracula had its world premiere at QPAC's Concert Hall from 3 to 6 September 2025. Burke did not set Bram Stoker's novel; he wrote his own scenario around it. The ballet opens centuries before the familiar plot, with Vlad's turn to vampirism after the death of his wife, and only then moves to the Harkers arriving at the castle on their honeymoon. The departure is wide enough that reviewers have advised reading the synopsis first, because the storytelling moves faster than the plot changes can be absorbed.

It runs two hours including a 20-minute interval, in two acts across eleven scenes. There are no projections: the design works with painted backdrops, archways, a staircase and a stained-glass window, and leans on lighting — red wash for the vampire scenes, near-darkness elsewhere. Sets are credited to Martin Thomas and Eric Luchen, costumes to Sophia Drakos with Fiona Holley and Jennifer Burke, lighting to Verity Hampson.

The score is compiled rather than composed. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3 and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture sit alongside Rachmaninov, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Debussy, joined by new material from Emmy-winning composer Jason Fernandez and Toby Alexander. The cast narrows the novel's crowd to three figures — Ervin Zagidullin as Dracula, Abbey Hansen as Mina, Burke as Jonathan Harker — supported by an ensemble recruited from alumni of the Mariinsky Theatre, English National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, The Australian Ballet and Queensland Ballet. The 2025 tour took it to Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Canberra, Auckland and Christchurch.

What else the company makes

Dracula is the engine, but not the whole catalogue. The Ballet International Gala continues as the company's showcase event. A new full-length work, The Great Gatsby, is billed for Singapore, London and Brisbane, and a Nutcracker is scheduled for Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne over Christmas 2026. Alongside the ballet sits Interstellar Live, a screening of Christopher Nolan's film with Hans Zimmer's score played by a 65-piece orchestra — a reminder that BIG Live is structured as a commercial producer that happens to run a ballet company, not the reverse.

London, San Francisco and an argument about taste

2026 was the year the work left the region. The London run included dates at Sadler's Wells in early June, taken as an independent hire rather than as part of the theatre's own programmed season. A reviewer who saw it there on 6 June 2026 described the interior castle set with its stained glass and staircase as doing most of the work, and singled out a sequence in which a villager searches the castle by candlelight, finds the bodies of the dead and is met by Dracula descending from above — a moment that drew audible gasps.

The American debut followed at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco from 3 to 12 July 2026, with tickets between roughly $60 and $232. The San Francisco Chronicle's Lily Janiak, writing on 4 July, made the case for the show as frankly trashy entertainment and argued that ballet should be allowed low art as well as high. She praised two choreographic ideas in particular: that Dracula only moves in full classical vocabulary once he has fed, and that his victims become mirrors whose movements he can puppeteer. The ghost brides' quick bourrées, which read as floating, were the aesthetic high point.

Her criticisms were as concrete. The partnering of Hansen looked effortful rather than weightless; the leaps from Burke and Zagidullin were high but loose-limbed; the characters' motivations stayed unclear, with no settled answer as to whether Jonathan and Mina are hypnotised, enslaved or willing; the Debussy pas de deux felt like a default choice; and the crowd scenes had little to do. Opening night in San Francisco drew an audience dressed for the occasion in black lace, corsets, brocade and top hats, which tells its own story about who the show is selling to.

Where it stands in October 2026

Dracula is mid-run as of October 2026. The Melbourne season at Her Majesty's Theatre opened on 10 September and plays 35 performances to 25 October. A short Sydney season ran at the State Theatre from 22 to 27 September, eight performances, and a longer one follows at the Capitol Theatre from 7 to 29 November — 22 performances, bringing the Australian total for the year to 65. A Brisbane season played QPAC's Lyric Theatre in late July. Hong Kong and Bangkok are announced for January 2027.

Australian reviews of the current season have been warm to the point of indulgence. The Scoop gave it five stars on 11 September, calling it the best live performance of 2026 and picking out the Act II pas de deux for Mina and Dracula and the synchronisation of the four-strong ghost quartet, with the only reservation being that recognisable classical tunes occasionally pull attention away from the drama. Writing for The Blurb, Alex First described the production as captivating, dramatic and sensual, crediting Zagidullin's stage presence and calling Hansen's performance flawless.

Burke's own framing is that ballet should deliver the emotional force of any large theatrical production, and Tarabay's is that demand follows when work connects. Both are self-serving positions, but the touring schedule is doing the arguing for them: a company five years old, with no subsidy, is running a longer season at Her Majesty's Theatre than most funded companies give a single title.