Regina Fernandez, Casey J. Adler, Adam Hagenbuch, Josh Odsess-Rubin and Janna Cardia (photo by Zach Mendez)
Reviewed by Philip Brandes
Ensemble Theatre Company
Through October 27
RECOMMENDED
In the atmospheric Prologue that opens Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, a quartet of caped narrators bearing ponderous tomes prepares us for a tale that “deals with the most significant aspects of the human condition: Life, Death…and a hot guy who takes off his shirt.”
Santa Barbara-based Ensemble Theatre Company’s ensuing production makes good on that promise with a rowdy, bawdy, over-the-top production of the Off-Broadway hit spoofing Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 gothic horror novel. Better still, as they toss aside their heavy books, our hosts assure us that although the original source text runs 418 pages, “this evening’s presentation will be significantly shorter.” Best of all, it doesn’t suck. Promises kept.
Imagine a theatrical love child between Charles Ludlum’s flamboyant gender-bent, cross-dressing antics and Mel Brooks’s spot-on genre parodies and you’ve got the general idea. In the title role, Adam Hagenbuch makes the most of many shirtless opportunities to display the requisite six-pack abs, his hotness amplified in flashy outfits by Marcy Froehlich. With appetites as omnivorously sexual as they are sanguinary, this Count’s an equal opportunity predator and Hagenbuch’s performance amusingly leans into all of it.
In addition to explicitly flaunting the transgressive taboos inherent in the archetypal vampire genre, the show’s co-authors Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen gleefully discard casting norms, specifying that all the characters can be played by actors of any gender, ethnicity, age or type. By design (as with Ludlum’s plays) the greater the mismatch, the funnier the result.
In this fully professional production, over 14 roles are capably handled by Casey J. Adler, Janna Cardia, Regina Fernandez, and Josh Odsess-Rubin. Their overblown performances are inherently funny, though readers familiar with Stoker’s novel will further appreciate their clever satirical spins on Stoker’s original characters and plot points.
As in the original story, the action kicks off with uptight, closeted real estate broker Jonathan Harker (Adler) arriving at Dracula’s castle, where he receives the Count’s famous welcome bidding him to enter of his own free will; when Harker comments on the oddness of the greeting, Dracula admits to “liability issues.” In other words, the play’s nominal fidelity to its Victorian-era setting poses no obstacle to plentiful opportunities for contemporary gags, puns and slapstick.
Following an eerie nautical cruise, Dracula takes up residence near a British lunatic asylum, where Cardia portrays both the presiding psychiatrist and his star patient Renfield. In a playful name switch of the novel’s heroines, Harker’s fiancée is the brilliant heartthrob Lucy (Fernandez), while Mina is her annoying spinster sister (a standout drag rendition by Odsess-Rubin, who also doubles as a female vampire slayer Van Helsing). Blossoming under Dracula’s seductive influence, each of these characters sheds inhibition to get their inner freak on.
One couldn’t ask for a more suitable director to helm this frenetic inanity than Jamie Torcellini, himself a gifted comic actor (his performance in Ensemble’s 2010 production of Ludlum’s The Mystery of Irma Vep included an astonishing sequence in which he walked behind a tapestry and, without breaking stride, emerged seconds later as another character in completely different costume). While Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors doesn’t offer that level of dexterity, the character transformations are skillful and fast-paced, at times employing inventive staging to enable the same actor to maintain two characters in the same conversation.
Production values are top-notch, evoking a suitably spooky environment through Stephen Gifford’s scenic design, lighting by Jared A. Sayeg, and spectacularly immersive sound by James Ard. It’s a bit ironic, though, that at times the technical excellence undermines some of the intentional cheesiness—actors creating cheap fog effects with hand-held spray cans would be even funnier without smoke machines simultaneously flooding the stage with massive amounts of it.
Turning now to the rich subtextual undercurrents of literary sophistication that propel a play whose very title is a Shakespearean allusion…psych! There are none. Every screwball element is right there on the surface…what you expect to see is exactly what you’ll get.
Ensemble Theatre Company, The New Vic, 33 West Victoria Street, Santa Barbara; Wed., 2 and 8pm; Thurs., 7:30 pm; Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 3 and 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; thru Oct. 27. https://etcsb.org . Running time, 90 minutes with no intermission.
