THE bad guy in “Dracula” these days is not its blood-sucking title character but its penny-pinching composer, Frank Wildhorn.
The cast of the show would like to drive a stake through his heart for trying to save money by recording the show without them.
The recording – which was being made on the sly until Melissa Errico, one of the stars of “Dracula,” heard about it from a friend – may also cause headaches for the show’s producer, Dodger Stage Holdings.
Yesterday, Actors’ Equity said it is investigating the matter to see if the recording violates the actors’ contract, which states that a producer cannot make a “sound recording” of a show without using the original cast until 19 weeks after the production has closed.
The critically clobbered “Dracula” closes Jan. 2.
Cast recordings are notoriously expensive to make. For every eight hours they spend in a recording studio, actors are entitled to a week’s salary.
All told, the cost of recording a Broadway show can run between $250,000 and $500,000.
The producer of a show usually controls the recording rights, licensing them to a record company, which pays the recording costs.
But because “Dracula” was so poorly received, no record company picked it up.
So Wildhorn decided to record it himself.
And in an effort to keep costs down, he’s using performers who are not in the show and therefore do not have to be paid Equity wages.
“I don’t have the kind of money it takes to use anyone from the show,” Wildhorn told The Post.
What Equity wants to know is just who, exactly, controls the recording rights to “Dracula.”
If the Dodgers do, then the recording violates their contract with Equity, and they could be forced by the union to pay the actors whatever fees the actors would have received had they made a cast recording.
The Dodgers may have waived their rights to allow Wildhorn to make the album on his own.
But that won’t satisfy the union.
“We have told the producers that we will hold them responsible if they waived any rights with Frank Wildhorn that impact the actors,” Alan Eisenberg, the head of the union, said.
The Dodgers said: “We have absolutely nothing to do with any recording Frank Wildhorn is doing.”
The matter will likely end up in arbitration, a production source said.
Wildhorn says he owns his songs and can record them in any way he sees fit.
A “Dracula” album, he contends, is a valuable marketing tool that can be used to generate productions of the show around the world.
“I have to make this copyright valuable to myself and my kids,” he said. “I can make records of my own stuff with my own money.”
A recording industry executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wildhorn is probably correct.
“They’re his songs; he can do anything he wants to with them,” the executive said. “As long as he doesn’t call the record a ‘cast album,’ Equity can’t stop him.”
Still, the executive said that recording the show without using the original actors “was a pretty sh – – – y thing to do.”
A least some of the actors feel that way, too.
They were stunned to learn, one day after they were told “Dracula” was closing, that they wouldn’t get to record the show.
Errico first heard about it from her friend, the Broadway actor Raul Esparza, who was asked by Wildhorn to record the role of Dracula (played by Tom Hewitt in the show), a theater source said.
Esparza, not wanting to take work away from actors in the show, declined.
A “Dracula” source says the cast feels “hugely depressed by this” and “betrayed” by Wildhorn.
It doesn’t sit well with the director of the show, Des McAnuff, either.
Last week, he went backstage and told the actors that he was sorry about the recording and that he had nothing to do with it.
Wildhorn sent the actors an e-mail outlining his reasons for making the album without them.
He told The Post, “I can’t blame them for feeling the way they do. But as everyone in the show knows, I spent months trying to find a record company to make a cast album. But unfortunately, in this particular case, I wasn’t able to pull it off.”