Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with the Menier Chocolate Factory, a theatre that almost exclusively seems to trade in brilliant musicals I love and terrible farces I hate. I want to go into these things with an open mind, but inevitably it’s the same outcome every time. And following its excellent revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers - now heading for the West End – guess what’s next?
Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway hit Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors isn’t that bad: it’s a goofy, gag-filled but fundamentally quite tame parody of Bram Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel that basically adds up to an old-fashioned BBC radio comedy.
It does have one genuine USP (US performer): transferring with the show, James Daly is undeniably very good looking and very stacked as the extremely camp Count Dracula. Handsome in a way British people aren’t – like a child’s drawing of a hunk – Daly’s weapons-grade American charisma does at least make the idea of building a show around him feel plausible when he’s on stage.
But otherwise it’s pretty dismal. A hard-working British cast of four – including musical theatre star Charlie Stemp as meek solicitor Jonathan Harker – flit energetically between roles, but their Englishness only serves to underscore the fact this has the air of a British radio comedy of decades past. Maybe if it felt more American it might seem less dated. It is, to break out the obvious metaphors, anaemic, defanged, lacking bite. Conventional couple Jonathan and Lucy (Safeena Ladha) are mildly sexually challenged by exotic stranger Dracula? Which is fine but we did that one already and better in The Rocky Horror Show, which is 52 years old.
Matters aren’t really helped by the fact Greenberg and Rosen take liberties with Stoker’s story, but in a crushingly prosaic way, eliding or simplifying the plot rather than interestingly subverting it or offering something nerdy for fans of the novel. For instance, here Jonathan’s initial trip to Transylvania to meet Dracula ends amicably and without incident rather than him being trapped in Dracula’s castle with three terrifying vampire maidens. It’s understandable why you might condense, but often it feels like it’s taking the piss out of things Stoker didn’t write, while passing up the opportunity to send up things he did. There’s also an underlying timidity: Dracula never really feels like a threat (physically or sexually) and the ending is dreadfully sappy.
Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors is affable enough and probably a decent shout to take your grandparents to: it’s old fashioned, not offensive. But why bother going to the effort of bringing it over from New York? Stoker’s Count famously caused a stir when he came to London; Greenberg and Rosen’s elicits a weak smile at best.
