The Picture of Dorian Gray

From the moment spellbindingly lovely Dorian Gray sells his soul for an eternally pretty face and a lifetime’s pursuit of amoral pleasure, we know that eventually he’ll be punished. It’s a Faust story, after all, and Faust stories (except perhaps in the case of Damn Yankees) always end with the antihero’s comeuppance. The fascinating tension in The Picture of Dorian Gray is between the moral of the story and its author’s resistance to morals of any kind. Victorian gothic melodrama may be the form, but it’s witty Wilde stand-in Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian’s deliciously bad influence, who steals the show.

What we have, then, is a slightly admonitory horror story leavened with touches of subversive drawing-room comedy—not the easiest tone to re-create on stage or screen. Glittering epigrams in gothic settings can come off as Vincent Price–style camp in the wrong hands, but doing away with the novel’s wit risks losing sight of Wilde (which was the only problem with Tommy Rapley’s otherwise exquisite dance-theater adaptation staged at Bailiwick in 2006).

Kauzlaric’s nimble adaptation manages to find a balance, first by focusing on the amusing, seductive wickedness of Lord Henry (played with deadpan insouciance by Holmquist and, as he ages, Sinitski), then by ratcheting up the thrills after intermission. Theis’s staging gets a bit overheated and stunt-heavy toward the end, but its only major flaw is Charlie Athanas’s titular portrait (deformed in the story by Dorian’s sins). It’s an unintentionally hilarious dead ringer for the Crypt Keeper.