Face it — with all the messiness of our news cycle, you need to get the heck outta Dodge; you need to get a breath of fresh air, check out a falling leaf or two, and generally reconnect with life outside the Beltway.
Oh, and you also need to laugh your ass off. Long and hard.
If you’re looking for some good, long, roll-on-the-floor stuff, have we got a show for you! Staunton, Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center has just what the doctor ordered, with their final repertory offering of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen. Under director Matt Radford Davies’ eagle eye, a tightly-knit cast of ASC regulars gives you a masterclass in comedy that is guaranteed to give you nonstop yuks (some cheap, but some pretty classy, I must say).
Greenberg and Rosen have made a name for themselves taking classics and skewering them mercilessly, perverting them into hilarious, chaotic messes. By design, their scripts feature a cast of only five actors, who must then play what must be triple the number of characters in the course of the evening. This makes for some deft hat-and-wig switching, with voices to match; half the fun is simply keeping track of who is playing whom, and when, while watching to see how they’ll manage having to play them all.
The only actor lacking this split-personality syndrome is ASC favorite Aidan O’Reilly, who owns the Blackfriars house in the role of our favorite bloodsucker. Decked out in dashing opera cape, black leather trousers, and smoking jacket, O’Reilly’s Dracula is clearly dressed to kill — but of course this being Greenberg and Rosen’s scenario, things don’t go off according to plan. O’Reilly’s gift for deadpan humor is on full display here, as he reveals himself to be the most determined and yet most clueless villain you’d ever meet on the moors.
Smitten with the adventurous Lucy (Sara Linares, in riveting form) once he arrives in England, our thirsty Count is forced to settle for Lucy’s wallflower sister, Mina, when he gets a bit peckish. In which role we get to enjoy yet another star turn from Angela Iannone. She of the Thousand Voices. Iannone has you in stitches as the insufferably annoying Mina, but only when she’s not doubling as Dr. Van Helsing, the bespectacled, tweed-clad German doctor whose accent is so thick it would take a cleaver to cut through it.
Leah Gabriel, meanwhile, gets to play the urbane, pipe-smoking Dr. Westfeldt, Mina and Lucy’s father, whose management of an insane asylum in his own home allows for the cast to take turns playing some rather eccentric servants: Gabriel combines Westfeldt with our favorite insect hunter Renfield (fly swatter in hand, natch), and we get to watch how both characters somehow manage to appear on stage simultaneously. Gabriel isn’t the only one to pull this off with aplomb.
Of all the romances that blossom on the stage, perhaps the oddest one develops between Dracula and Jonathan Harker, Lucy’s fiancée, played with amusing reticence by K. P. Powell. Harker/Powell’s refusal to stand up for himself, let alone for his intended, makes for some delicious irony, as Lucy proves to be the one “wearing the pants” between the two of them. Greenberg and Rosen use Harker’s character, among others, as an opportunity to demolish our usual gendered expectations and gender habits, which are skewered systematically throughout the evening.
This being a more contemporary take on the Count, we also see a vampire who is quite liberal in his tastes, willing to take on Jonathan in addition to any female he can waltz into his clutches. Harker’s resulting transformation, after a fateful private encounter with Dracula, is every bodice-ripper’s dream, and his hilarious, outrageous “coming out” will leave you begging for mercy (bad news: he has none).
Presiding over the festivities from her perch in the Blackfriars balcony is Summer England, ASC’s musical director, who as the show’s Foley artist provides us with sound effects galore; creepy screeching sounds abound, of course, and I guarantee you’ll never look at that folding fan of yours the same way.
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors offers a solid 100 minutes of nonstop, madcap insanity, featuring another ripping tale of our favorite Vlad — not the Russian one, the Transylvanian one. Vlad the Impaler. Dracula to you — Count Dracula.
Running Time: One hour and 40+ minutes, with no intermission.
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors plays through November 24, 2024 (in repertory with The Merry Wives of Windsor through November 23 and Macbeth through November 23), presented by American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse, 10 South Market Street, Staunton, VA. For tickets (starting at $33), call the box office at (540) 851-3400, or purchase them online. ASC also offers a Local Rush deal of 50% off tickets on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Learn more here.
Cast and artistic team credits for Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors are online here (scroll down).
SEE ALSO:
A ‘Macbeth’ for our moment at American Shakespeare Center (review by Andrew Walker White, July 23, 2024)
A madcap ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ at American Shakespeare Center (review by Andrew Walker White, September 25, 2024)
