DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS
by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen
Directed by Gordon Greenberg
New World Stages
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Theatrical parody of genre tropes is tough to get right. Too often, the target is misunderstood, or not sufficiently understood (under-understood?) and the proceedings descend into camp—or worse, are used as an excuse for camp and cheap sex jokes (and cheap-sex jokes).
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for getting it right, but there is one principle that I think holds:
You have to be serious about the storytelling .
If your structure is sound and your plotting coherent, you can get away with all kinds of japery. And that’s basically what keeps Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors aloft for its 90 intermissionless minutes; scripters Gordon Greenberg (who also directed) and Steve Rosen have hewed very closely to the familiar outline of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, the warhorse 1924 stage adaptation by Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston and the more-or-less faithful cinematic treatments it has had since.
With this solidity, they affect their reversals not upon plot, but upon character. All the familiar ones are here: Jonathan Harker. Mina, Renfield, Mina, Van Helsing, the master vampire et. al., but none of them shows up as you expect them to. I could catalog a bit of how that happens here, but among the pleasures of these spins on persona is the surprise entrance introducing the variation. I suppose the one thing I can reveal without spoiling too much is that, with the cast numbering a mere five—Jordan Boatman, James Daly, Ellen Harvey, Andrew Keenan-Bolger and the redoubtable veteran of such enterprises, Arnie Burton, all expert comedians—the transparent theatrical “illusions,” multiple-casting, crazy quick-changing, sight gags and gender-bending abound.
A design team of five—Tijana Bjelajac, Tristan Raines, Rob Denton, Victoria Deioro and Ashley Rae Callahan—have done a masterful job of making both the visual and aural ambience extravagant enough for verisimilitude and budget enough to suggest things will be done on the fly.
It all works extremely well. I could nitpick here and there, but my significant other was giddy with delight all through it, and in the car on the way home, gushed over the comic precision of the effects and performances and concluded with, “It’s just about perfect.”
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far; but given this Dracula’s mission and how well it delivers, I’m happy to leave it at that.