Review: DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS at Arizona Theatre Company
The production runs through June 7th at Tempe Center for the Arts in Tempe, AZ.
Some productions of DRACULA take the story’s gothic atmosphere so seriously they forget the Count himself would find them tedious. Arizona Theatre Company's current staging of Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen's adaptation, DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS, doesn’t go down that road. Instead, it treats the whole mythology as an elaborate setup for one punchline after another. The Gothic toolkit remains. The strobes abound. The thunder booms, the shadows hover, mist flows, and handheld sprayers are brandished like weapons. ATC just refuses to treat any of it with a straight face. What follows is unabashedly campy, nonstop shtick, pulled off by a sharp ensemble that knows exactly what it's doing with every bit.
This isn't simply a modernized DRACULA. It's a DRACULA with an existential itch it can't scratch. The Prince of Darkness is still immortal, still dangerous, but he's also desperately lonely, a self-mythologizing celebrity who has spent centuries managing a brand nobody is around to appreciate. When Jonathan Harker shows up in Transylvania to finalize an English property deal, Dracula sees something more valuable than a business transaction: a ticket out, and an audience to go with it.
What makes ATC's production, directed by Greenberg, especially distinctive is how five performers expertly carry an entire ecosystem of characters. The quick changes are dizzying: actors pivoting between characters with barely enough breath to finish a sentence before becoming someone else entirely.
As the earnest English estate agent who'll deliver Dracula to England, James Romney's Harker is the production's resident straight man: sincere, awkward, and so genuinely smitten with Lucy that his devotion becomes its own running joke.
Kelly Bashar (across multiple roles including Dr. Westfeldt and Renfield) brings a gleeful unpredictability to every role, while Susana Cordón's Lucy is sharp enough to play straight to Romney's besotted Harker and still get the bigger laugh.
Paul Vogt, switching between Mina and Van Helsing, is the production's designated scene-stealer: a commanding presence, fully committed, and funnier the further over the top he goes. The kind of performer who finds the largest possible choice in every moment and makes it work.
And as Dracula, Christopher James Stevens excels in playing the Count as pure camp. Anemic, platinum-blond, and built like someone who has had eternity to work on it, he threads vanity and vulnerability together, making the character's hunger for admiration feel less monstrous and almost human.
The production's comedy runs on barely-contained chaos: accents slip, identities blur, momentum builds through near-disaster rather than resolution. The laughs aren't just in the jokes or the timing; they're in watching everything nearly fall apart: costumes, character continuity, the fourth wall itself, which the cast breaks early and often.
All of it lands in a world meticulously imagined by the design team. Tijana Bjelajac's scenic design anchors the action in a space lined with blood-red panels that double as coffins, punctuated by cutout windows through which Dracula makes his entrances and exits, controlling his own appearances with the precision of someone who has, after all, had centuries to rehearse them. Tristan Raines's costumes keep pace with the production's identity-scrambling demands, Rob Denton's lighting delivers all the Gothic atmosphere you could want…and does it with obvious relish. Victoria Deiorio's original music and sound design give the whole thing its pulse.
This is the kind of show that reminds you why live theatre exists. Funny, fast, and fiendishly well-performed. The Count would approve.
DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS runs through June 7th at:
Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ -- 1-833-ATC-SEAT
Arizona Theatre Company ~ https://atc.org/
Photo credit to Tim Fuller – L to R: James Romney, Susana Cordon. Christopher James Stevens, Kelly Bashar
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