‘Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors’ is a trip worth taking to Halifax’s Neptune

Hilarious for its rich comic invention, reinventing the tale once more.

Halifax’s venerable Neptune Theatre’s MainStage is alive in October with a reinvented version of Dracula delivered as a rapid-fire, very physical comedy.

Adapting Bram Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel Dracula as a Feydeau-like farce, Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen turn up the action to milk the humour from the oft-told

narrative of the mysterious blood-sucking Count. In the hands of Neptune’s Artistic Director Jeremy Webb, the five onstage actors have a ball with the story. The audience does too.

Feydeau farces feature slamming doors. Neptune does it one better, with doors so portable they can be wheeled together to suggest a whole castle dungeon. It’s one of the funniest theatrical turns, and Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors delivers a humorous reduction of the languorous landscapes in the many cinema versions we’ve all seen.

As the meek English realtor approaches the Castle in Transylvania, the carriage stays in the centre of the stage while the three other cast members flash past holding trees. It was a deliciously silly bit of stage business. The whole show was so vigorously silly, in fact, that the production always seemed on the edge of falling apart. One sequence saw the onstage character Mina throwing herself at the Count; the Count could be seen cracking up. Repeatedly. The humour rippled through the cast and the whole audience.

Allie MacDonald anchors the production as Count Dracula. Unlike the pale, aristocratic vampires of the cinema, the solidly built, chiselled, handsome MacDonald spends most of the production shirtless, with a flamboyantly flung cape that occasionally covers his entrances and exits. Those are so ripely executed they seem like a blend between a CrossFit workout and a Go Go Boy’s cage routine. This comedy is closely related to The Rocky Horror Show, blending sexuality, camp, and deadpan humour into a blithely original vision.

MacDonald’s intensely physical performance puts the theatre back into the Dracula story. While he dominates the stage with his boyish narcissism and dangerous charisma, the rest of the cast push back with sheer comic invention. They all play multiple characters, and often flip the limitation for laughs, such as switching characters so they can converse with themselves.

Ryan Rogerson—as the (bearded) sister Mina and the German Scientist Van Helsing—must examine Mina after she’s been bitten by the Vampire. The back-and-forth is so ludicrous it has to be funny, and everyone is in on the joke. Rogerson is also the only other actor who can hold the stage against Allie MacDonald’s Count, which again reveals the show’s vital physicality.

Hugh Ritchie takes on the thankless role of the disengaged suitor Jonathan Harker—a role played by Halifax’s David Manners in the famed 1931 Tod Browning Universal film version—but even Ritchie becomes hip (complete with leather pants and a fluffy romantic shirt) once the Vampire bites him.

Stephanie MacDonald plays the Doctor and Renfield in a neat gender role reversal that helps speed the plot along; Becca Guilderon, as Lucy, Kitty the maid, and the Transylvanian Driver, fills in the rest of the lesser roles with gusto.

The extensive sets—Lucas Arab gets the credit for the massive expressionist Castle designs leaning so slightly askew—loom over the actors with an absorbing sense of atmosphere. JB Nelles nailed the late Turn-of-the-Last-Century costumes, with the stuffy Victorian Era only having a few years left to run. Jeremy Webb himself was credited with the sound design, which earned at least one hearty laugh for reviving the old dial-up internet buzz rattle early on. Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting design battled the clouds of Gothic smoke to properly illuminate the main action; she hit all the right notes for the various castles visited by the constantly moving cast.

The play is surprisingly faithful to the original Stoker story, with the trip to Transylvania being followed by the ship voyage to England and then the main narrative working its way out in the UK proper. Stoker was the great actor Henry Irving’s assistant, and he allegedly based Dracula on his boss, a domineering stage monstrosity known for maiming Shakespeare to suit his fancies. So there’s a neat echo in all of this comedic frenzy. Dracula came from the theatre and has returned to its origins.

The fast pace and compact delivery—100 minutes with no intermission—make this Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors a manic but almost constantly hilarious trip through one of the most well-worn tropes in the Western canon. Neptune’s rich comic invention re-invents the tale one more time, and it is indeed a comedic trip well worth taking.

The production runs to October 25 at Neptune Theatre’s Fountain Hall Stage, 1593 Argyle Street, Halifax. For tickets: neptunetheatre.com or call (902) 429-7070.

Neptune Theatre presents

Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors by Gordon Greenberg and Steven Rosen

Director and Sound Design: Jeremy Webb

Lighting Design: Leigh Ann Vary

Scenic Design: Lucas Arab

JB Nelles: Costumes

Samantha Wilson: Intimacy Coordinator

Jenn Hewitt: Stage Manager

Gina Woodward: Assistant Stage Manager

Performers:

Becca Guilderson-Lucy/Kitty/Driver

Allie MacDonald-Dracula