THEATRE REVIEW

OCTOBER 2026 | Volume 268

 

Having just come back from Transylvania (seriously!) and having visited Bran Castle, purported home of Count Dracula (the castle is real and so was 13th century Count Dracula—aka sadistically violent Vlad the Impaler—but the connection between vampire lord and castle not so much), I was curious to see what sounded like a tacky Halloween parody. Oooh, scary, kids!

Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is sure enough comedy and parody, following a simplified outline of the plot and major characters of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic novel, Dracula. At one level it comes off like an extended Saturday Night Live skit. All the characters are highly exaggerated and most cross-gendered, firing gags with rat-tat-tat regularity. But it doesn’t take long to recognize that director Josh Epstein has gathered a comically gifted cast and an inspired group of designers, and put together a very funny, extremely clever all-ages comic hit.

The rough plot: mild-mannered realtor Jonathan Harker (Vincent Tong) travels to Transylvania to help Count Dracula (Synthia Yusuf) buy a house in London, then returns to London where his pretty fiancée Lucy (Kate Besworth) lives with her father (Steffanie Davis) and her not-so-pretty sister Mina (Jeff Meadows). Dracula follows him to London, surviving a shipwreck and lusting for Lucy’s blood. (SPOILER ALERT: Dracula transforms Harker into a vampire.) Then they all, plus Dr. Van Helsing (Meadows), hunt Dracula to put a stake through his heart.

Amid a great deal of silliness, the quality of the comic performances and the non-stop pace Epstein puts them through stand out. Yusuf makes an awesome Drac. Resplendent in black leather, she makes her entrance to stripper music, embodying a sensual, highly physical strength that she retains throughout. As the ingenue Lucy, Besworth is Drac’s perfect foil. But hers is the straightest part. I would like to have seen her partake a little more in the production’s comic perversity, although a simulated sex scene late in the play is plenty hot – and very funny.

Meadows, about twice Besworth’s height, is hilarious as her horny, neglected sister and as a female Van Helsing. Davis does a great job as the stuffy paterfamilias/lord of the manor. She also plays the family’s ultra-weird servant Renfield, obsessed with eating bugs, and her sometimes instant shifts between the two characters delighted the opening night audience.

Finally, when dull, cowardly Harker is transformed by Dracula’s toothy kiss into a creature of the night, Tong puts on a remarkable show of dance, physical strength and flexibility to rival Yusuf’s Dracula. And he performs a pec-twitch you have to see to believe. It brings down the house.

MJ Coomber’s sound and Donnie Tejanie’s costumes play a big part in the non-stop comedy along with Gerald King’s lighting and Alaia Hamer’s active set design. And I want to reiterate that, while the ensemble cast is terrific, the highest praise goes to Epstein for his direction, putting this all together, generating laughs at a very high rate, maintaining the frantic pace for 105 minutes without intermission, and making the potentially tacky terrible, horrible, bloody fun.

 

 

 

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