Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors: Sentell Harper and Noah Israel – Photo: Cameron Whitman
Constellation conducts some wickedly funny business with Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s screwball spoof of Bram Stoker’s gothic horror tale. Zingy and zany, Nick Martin’s production is maybe not as sidesplittingly hilarious as the company’s friends in the house on opening night might have you believe, but it’s still damn funny.
True to the chilling atmosphere of the novel, the play begins with a warning to intrepid hero Jonathan Harker (Sentell Harper) that nothing “but death, destruction, and evil” awaits inside the castle of Count Dracula. Of course, in this comic spin, what actually awaits are Mel Brooksian parody, sexed-up silliness, and blood-sucking shenanigans presided over by a louche, leather-clad Count looking for love.
It’s a period piece, but this Dracula, portrayed by Noah Israel, is a modern-looking vampire, more Lestat than Lugosi. Aptly outfitted by costume designer Frank Labovitz, the glam goth Prince of Darkness definitely suits an adaptation that, for the most part fruitfully, mashes up eras and references to other depictions of the story. (Are those strains of the score from Coppola’s Dracula?)
The show also plays around liberally with the archetypal characterizations of the Count, Harker, Dr. Van Helsing (Julia Klavans, a hoot and a half), and fair maidens Lucy (Natalie Cutcher) and Mina (Klavans, again), who are sisters in this version.
Cast to be a sexy, funny Drac, Israel looks the part, though doesn’t entirely embody the Count’s confidence. Throwing himself into the physical rigors of the role — from stalking his prey around the stage, to lounging, panther-like, across Sarah Beth Hall’s dark and velvety set — the actor seems tentative in the comic timing, still wrapping his tongue around the bons mots and double entendres.
Klavans, with her shamelessly daft Mina, and Ryan Sellers, in quick-change mode as Mina and Lucy’s doctor dad, as well as creepy minion Renfield, tear into their multiple roles with all the moxie required. They exemplify the randy, rambunctious spirit of the enterprise, along with Harper’s fabulously fey Jonathan Harker, who’s also responsible for an appropriately ridiculous scene of puppetry.
Harper and Israel generate a humorously homoerotic rapport that sells the Count as sexually fluid, a facet of lore that’s turned up a notch here, for tension and laughs. Although, if they’re gonna go there, they should really go there, but this show isn’t that kind of sexy. Yet, while the narrative feels like it runs a bit long, the laughs and pacing never flag.
Dracula gains a good boost from Klavans’ entrance midway as an unflappably droll Van Helsing, the vampire hunter with just the right expertise to take on this creature of the night. She’s also just in time to bring home Greenberg and Rosen’s enjoyable remix of one of English literature’s most repurposed legends.
An endlessly pliable stand-in for lost faith and forbidden desire, the Count is that blood-sucker we just can’t seem to get enough of, as evidenced by the intriguing new horror film adaptation Dracula from French auteur Luc Besson, hoping to sink its teeth into the box office this weekend in movie theaters nationwide.
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors (★★★☆☆) runs through Feb. 15 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. Tickets are $45 to $55, with Pay What You Wish options. Call 202-399-7993, ext. 2, or visitwww.constellationtheatre.org.
Supposedly inhabiting the same world as the film franchise, Levi Holloway’s play Paranormal Activities gives “crowd-pleaser” a bad name. Where the films brought top-notch terror to HGTV homes and the people who love them, this spin-off may have some clever stagecraft, but it can’t hide the fact that it’s an inch deep and an inch wide. In between a few quality jump-scares (at least by theatrical standards), this is a paper-thin story about a couple who are about as interesting as a pair of Hydro Flasks bouncing around in a backpack.
There’s certainly potential here. A young American couple lands in a London house where they feel alone and isolated. Lou (Cher Alvarez) is quickly revealed to be psychically (and possibly psychologically) unsettled, while James (Travis A. Knight) is the kind of guy who thinks minimizing things will keep the lid on life. But unlike the films, where the pool-noodle realism created an entirely novel home for horror, everything here is so short-handed, there’s simply no sense of a real place where God-awful things are happening.
On a rainy night inside a nondescript church basement, eight strangers gather in a support group for addicts struggling with digital dependency. Actually, at the outset of Octet, Dave Malloy's a cappella chamber musical presented in the round at Studio Theatre, seven in the group have already arrived, each stowing away their cell phone. But one of the eight chairs sits empty.
The eighth in this eclectic octet, a young woman, Velma (Amelia Aguilar), enters slightly late, seemingly unsure about her place here, or whether she's prepared to add her voice to the chorus of confessions. Whatever her reservations, she is not initially one with the group. Will that change over the course of these 100 minutes? We have a hunch.
In 2015, it all seemed to be a novel concept. That's the year Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer Prize-nominated Marjorie Prime premiered Off-Broadway. Certainly, artificial intelligence had been developed, but in the ten years since, its sophistication and abilities have reached levels that are both beneficial and ethically questionable. Now, the piece has returned, this time on Broadway.
The use of AI rests at the center of Harrison's drama about Marjorie (June Squibb), an octogenarian who lives with her daughter, Tess (Cynthia Nixon), and her son-in-law Jon (Danny Burstein). Christopher Lowell rounds out the cast as Walter, a computerized version of Marjorie's deceased husband, known as a "Prime." With short-term memory loss and slight dementia plaguing Marjorie, the robotic form of her late spouse reappears in his thirties and relays information provided to him by Jon and Tess.
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