“Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” races across the Bristol Riverside stage without ever establishing an identity or a reason to laugh, let alone care, about what is happening.
Ken Kaissar’s production of Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s piece is played as a farce cum drag show. It panders for laughs, but it never takes itself or Greenberg and Rosen’s material seriously enough for anything to matter.
Rather than rollicking or thrilling, it bores. The problem is it finds no style. Reading through Greenberg and Rosen’s text, there are opportunities for laughs and moments for drama. The jokes, mostly in the form of sardonic drollery, are there in the script. They’re not given a chance to land because Kaissar and company choose broadness over the comic subtlety needed to make a bon mot pay off. Overwrought business replaces wit or taste, so this “Dracula” becomes a collection of moues, poses and self-conscious acting and delivery. William Bednar, Danny Vaccaro and Brenny Campbell find occasional moments to show their comic mettle, but in general, Kaissar’s production tries so hard to be funny, it misses its mark by not knowing the difference between pleading for a laugh and nailing a legitimate zing.
Somewhere there has to be a middle ground and one agreed-upon form of comic performance. By being all over the place, most minutes farce, some standard sketch comedy, this “Dracula” never gets its footing and seems as if it lacks direction or purpose.
It can’t entertain because it’s too busy working at what it thinks might be entertainment. It gives the audience nothing to really grab, nothing to hold on to. It stays insular, contained on the stage and never reaching out to the house. Even when the actors stop for a second and turn to the house to deliver a line, that line would be better delivered naturally within a tight staging that creates its English and Transylvanian settings more realistically and takes its characters seriously instead of treating them as stereotypes and clowns.
That’s the point about farce. It works best when played in earnest. Hoking it up and shilling for audience reaction takes away any bite or effect. It turns productions into messes. That’s what happens in Bristol. I can see a different “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” through the mayhem, but Greenberg and Rosen are not being served well here.
By any definition of “served.”
The concentration on speed sans that essence of comedy, timing, robs “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” of any dramatic heft in addition to making it leaden as a comedy.
The play is still a “Dracula” story, one most people know considering how popular the Transylvanian count has been since Bela Lugosi donned his cape in Tod Browning’s 1931 movie. Being so familiar, its story and horror need to develop suspense and intensity even more than a thriller that is being introduced.
Kaissar’s production takes too much for granted. It forgets that within a comedy and comic tone of writing, weighty things are going on. People are being left for dead in parks. In the immediate setting, with characters we should be made to care about, young women’s lives are being jeopardized via gruesome domination and possible death.
Opting for farce or not, these threats are the crux of any “Dracula.” They have to be made clear on stage. In Bristol, they are totally dismissed. There’s no drama, no fear, no terror, only talk about it in a comme il faut manner that leads nowhere. Emotion is as absent as sure-handed comedy.
As I said, it’s a mess.
It doesn’t start out as one. Upon taking a seat in the theater, one notices the clever complexity of Tijana Bjelajac’s set, with its walls suggesting bat wings and its valance in the shape of Dracula’s cape. The coffins built into this scenery make it all the kickier.
Bjelajac’s construction promises fun and expectation. It puts you in the mood for what’s to come.
That mood is quickly spoiled when Greenberg and Rosen choose to begin their play with narration instead of going right into the action.
A surtitle projected on the capelike valance would suffice for giving time and place. The background provided by the dialogue is unnecessary because it’s well known. Jokes and attempts at inculcating modern situations and side comments in the text backfire. They trigger the idea that pandering will be rife.
That idea will become the rule.
The first performed scene shows Jonathan Harker (William Bednar) on his precarious carriage ride through the Carpathian Woods to the castle Dracula is selling so he can move to London, where Harker, a real estate agent, has lucratively sold him five properties.
As usual, the sound, designed by Damien Figueras, is too high-pitched. Some of Greenberg and Rosen’s dialogue gets lost in the overamplified volume. Adding to the confusion is the frenzy in which the ride, meant to be comic (it should be comic), is staged.
Here is where you see the production’s rush and how any Greenberg and Rosen joke will be pushed at the audience instead of being said as a sardonic passing comment.
The audience is not trusted to hear, recognize and appreciate the joke. It is thrust upon them.
Mistake. Bad form. The cued humor is killed before it can generate a laugh.
Kaissar’s cast does a good job with physical comedy, but there’s too much of it to focus on, so it too loses the impact it might have had.
The overkill continues, to be overcome only when Greenberg and Rosen provide explanatory passages William Bednar and Danny Vaccaro manage to bring to the fore unscathed.
Other than that, it’s antic after antic with little definition and few chances to latch on to this production and ride with it as is.
Worst among all excesses is the way Count Dracula is portrayed.
Don’t blame Davey Miller, who plays the deadly ancient Transylvanian who has lived for centuries on the blood of the innocent and/or comely.
He is doing what he’s told to do.
It’s not his fault there’s too much of it.
As Greenberg and Rosen design Dracula, Miller has to play the part with a sense of appetite and lust. A picture showing Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Westfeldt’s, neck unleashes a desire that could be funny if, you got it, it wasn’t so overplayed.
It may be Kaissar, it may be Miller, but one or both of them doesn’t understand “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” is not “The Rocky Horror Show.” (Currently on Broadway, if you want to see it.)
Miller’s Dracula is a facsimile of “Rocky Horror’s” lead character, Frank-N-Furter, a role I’m not surprised to see Miller has played.
He continues to play him. In a different production of a different play.
Greenberg and Rosen’s script says Dracula should be sexy. Their opening narration advertises a “naked male chest” the audience will want to see.
Miller provides that chest. He also provides lounge lizard moves, leers and a fanged smile that denote his Dracula as a barroom lech with a yen for blood as opposed to gin. They also indicate his desire for beautiful women like Lucy and a stray man or two.
In Kaissar’s production, Miller does too much. His overarching desire for flesh at any level undercuts anything sinister or menacing about him. His stripping strips him of any danger. You can’t get into the terror Greenberg and Rosen mention in their title because a drag act that is more conducive to a 20-something’s house party dominates Miller’s performance and erases any threat of peril from the Bristol stage.
Davey Miller is great at what he’s doing. He’s just doing too much of the wrong thing.
William Bednar does the opposite. He alone among Kaissar’s cast seems to find the perfect line between jest and farce.
Unlike most of his castmates, Bednar delivers jokes in the offhand manner of a man saying something that happens to be funny. Only he totally controls the broad portions of his performance, marrying a comedian’s taste and pacing to the intentionally outrageous.
Bristol favorite Danny Vaccaro seems to succumb to the production’s pitfall when he plays the avidly amorous and always overlooked Mina Westfeldt, but when he returns to the stage as the vampire specialist, Dr. Von Helsing, intentionally written as a woman, he too combines comedy with dramatic purpose. Vaccaro’s explanations as Von Helsing are the closest anyone comes to commanding full attention to what his character is doing and saying.
Brenny Campbell does a neat quick-change act as Dr. Westfeldt, father of Lucy and Mina and head of an asylum for the mentally delusional. She is also winning as Renfield, the insect-gorging Westfeldt inmate at one point under the spell of Dracula.
Laura Cable is asked to do the least farce as Lucy. It gives her the chance to bring some semblance of reason to Kaissar’s staging. She is also fun as the kleptomaniac inmate, Kitty.
Tristan Raines’s costumes match Tijana Bjelajac’s set for wittiness. Cameron Filepas’s lighting is bold and crisp when shadows and effects are needed. The red, green and yellow lights that flash to create a sense of malice are too bright and one-note to work.
“Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” runs through Sunday, Oct. 25, at Bristol Riverside Theatre, Bristol, Pennsylvania. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets range from $59 to $69 and are available at brtstage.org or by calling 215-752-0100.
