Review: Actors' Shakespeare Project's DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS is up to its Neck in Laughs

Getting blood sucked out of your neck doesn’t sound like much fun, but with the always game Paul Melendy as the corpuscle-craving Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula, it provides just one of the many laugh-out-loud moments in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s devilishly funny “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors,” at Watertown’s Mosesian Center for the Arts through November 1.

Since his first appearance in the 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker, the character of Dracula has gone on to hold the record for more visual appearances than any other horror character. The bloodthirsty villain has been played by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., Christopher Lee, George Hamilton, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman, to name but a few. And just to prove that he’s got a good agent, there’s also Sesame Street’s Count von Count and the cereal world’s Count Chocula.

Melendy – a two-time Elliot Norton Award winner who has carved out a niche all his own playing outlandish characters in shows like Central Square Theater’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful,” Greater Boston Stage Company’s “Featherbaby,” and Lyric Stage Boston’s “A Sherlock Carol” – tackles his latest role with his customary abandon.

Costume Designer Zoë Sundra uses every manner of fabric, from skintight leather to sparkling see-through mesh, to stylize Melendy’s Dracula in the vein of a Hollywood hipster, complete with a modified bouffant. He still wears the cape, but minus the traditional black and white palette. There are changes to other characters from the original source material, too, in this two-act play written by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, first produced in New York in 2023–24 and in London last year.

For the uninitiated, “Dracula” is the story of a vampire who journeys from Transylvania to England to find new necks to tap, particularly those of Jonathan Harker and the women in his life. In Watertown, some plot points have been simplified and several characters combined or cut to allow for a five-actor cast.

With Melendy and ASP resident artists Doug Lockwood as Mina and Dr. Van Helsing, Bobbie Steinbach as Dr. Westfield and Renfield, Nicholas Papayoanou as Jonathan Harker, and Thalia Gerloff as Lucy and Kitty, director Christopher V. Edwards, ASP’s artistic director, has assembled a cast that is – like the best comedy troupes of recent memory, from Monty Python and SCTV to the Kids in the Hall – impressively symbiotic and wacky to the hilt.

The acting is superb and the pacing breathtaking. Papayoanou does great work as the shy, surprisingly naïve real estate agent Jonathan, with his buttoned-up attire contributing to the giggles that accompany his sexualized flirting with Melendy. Gerloff as Lucy, Jonathan’s fiancée, knows just how to play the horror-movie heroine of yesteryear.

Lockwood and Steinbach, who complete the quintet, are both magnificent. Whether in drag or out, they energetically lampoon traditional Victorian gender politics – with Steinbach, recipient of the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence, frequently flipping her wig to bring both the sexist Dr. Westfield and his patient, Renfield, alive. And in an almost show-stealing romp, Lockwood plays Mina and a feminist, female Dr. Van Helsing who’s entirely of Lockwood’s very talented making.

While it may wander from Stoker’s original telling, it’s all in good fun in this campy, sexy, spirited, and perfectly wrought rendering.

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