Theatre review: Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors mixes broad slapstick with biting commentary
Gender-bending Arts Club production of Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s gothic comedy includes plenty of absurd humour and one perfectly cast vampire
Left to right: Kate Besworth as Lucy and Jeff Meadows as Mina, Synthia Yusuf as Dracula. Photos by Moonrider Productions
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors at the Lindsay Family Stage at Granville Island to November 15
A NUMBER OF PEOPLE attended the opening night of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors with their children in tow on October 28, and the kids probably had a blast. From its broad, panto-esque characterizations to its over-the-top slapstick, the Arts Club’s production of the gothic comedy by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen has a lot to appeal to the younger set.
Even the horror elements are played for laughs. The wolves that terrorize young real-estate agent Jonathan Harker (Vincent Tong) on his nighttime journey through the Carpathian Mountains, for example, are actually exceedingly silly hand puppets with red LED eyes, operated by other members of the cast.
Vincent Tong in Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors. Photo by Moonrider Productions
Parents should be forewarned, on the other hand, that the show’s content warnings about sexual innuendo and simulated sex are for real. In one scene, Harker and his fianceé, Lucy (Kate Besworth), cycle through a virtual Kama Sutra of positions in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, with the naughty parts concealed by an artfully deployed blanket.
In a different scene, when Count Dracula (Synthia Yusuf) is interrupted in the middle of his erotic seduction of Harker, he conspicuously hides his implied boner behind his bat-winged cape.
I could caution that such humour is intended for mature audiences, but—let’s face it—maturity isn’t really the point, and in fact these bits of business had your reviewer snickering like an 11-year-old schoolboy.
Under Josh Epstein’s direction, most of the show isn’t quite so ribald, but it does wring much of its humour from absurd situations. It’s unimaginable that anyone reading this will require a plot synopsis of Dracula, but here are the basics. An English estate agent travels to a remote Transylvanian castle to finalize the details of a mysterious count’s purchase of several properties in London. Said count turns out to be a vampire, of course, and once in the U.K., he sets his sights on the agent’s bride-to-be. All manner of bloody chaos ensues, and (spoiler alert!) the good guys enlist the learned Dr. Van Helsing to help them dispatch the nosferatu for good.
A Comedy of Terrors follows the plot of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as much as it needs to, but since everyone knows the story anyway, it can afford to deviate from it for the sake of comedy. A show like this lives or dies on its cast’s commitment to the ridiculous, and on that front, the Arts Club’s version is riotously alive. Or undead, perhaps.
Casting Yusuf as Dracula was a stroke of genius. She has the physical comedy chops to pull off the strutting, cocksure take on the vamp that this script requires; as a woman playing a quintessentially male monster, her ability to embody Drac’s swagger turns her performance into an appropriately biting commentary on toxic masculinity.
With the exception of Yusuf, the whole cast takes on multiple roles. This makes for some hilariously quick transformations, especially on the part of Steffanie Davis, who pulls off a couple of breathtakingly rapid switches between her two main roles, the patriarch Dr. Westfeldt and his straitjacketed patient/manservant Renfield. (As Davis told Stir in a recent interview, costume designer Donnie Tejani deserves full marks for making those changes possible.)
Tong also plays a trio of suitors (via more hand puppets) and a cockney gravedigger, but his Harker is really two roles in one—the milquetoast original and, after Dracula infects him with a bit of vampire blood, a gyrating, black-pleather-clad horndog.
Jeff Meadows earns his share of yuks as both Lucy’s romance-starved old-maid sister Mina and the deadpan Van Helsing, whom Westfeldt can’t quite believe is a real doctor since she’s, well, a woman.
Besworth displays deliciously dry wit as the chronically underestimated Lucy, and delivers laughs as the sticky-fingered housemaid Kitty, who gets lured away from the Westfeldt household and into Dracula’s employ not by his vampiric mesmerism, but because he’s willing to pay a living wage.
Thanks to Alaia Hamer’s set, Gerald King’s lighting, and MJ Coomber’s sound design, a few gothic arches and stained glass windows are all it takes to conjure up both Dracula’s ancient castle and the Westfeldts’ English estate. Like the rest of the show, it’s evocative of spooky things without actually being outright scary.
That makes it yet another kid-friendly element. However, dear parents, as to whether your younglings are ready to witness a few seconds of simulated sodomy, I’ll leave that decision up to you. 
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