The groanworthy title sets the tone for this fun re-telling of Dracula via close harmony singing and a stream of winkingly awful puns. Co-writers Dan Patterson (Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week) and Jez Bond, also directing, feed an irreverent combination of Bram Stoker’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film version through a Mel Brooks musical mangle.
Dracula (Ako Mitchell) is moping around his castle in Transylvania until English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Stephen Ashfield) turns up bearing deeds to a property and a portrait of his wife, Mina (Lorna Want), who looks eerily like the vampire’s long-dead love. He imprisons Harker and sets off to find Mina, who’s staying with her friend Lucy (Keala Settle) in Whitby.
These are the bare bones of a production that may be gothic in origin but is panto in spirit. Patterson and Bond delight in sending up the clichés of the Victorian novel and stage conventions. Every line is basically a set-up for knowing jokes gleefully tossed at us and accompanied by a cappella versions of cheesy pop anthems, from ‘Eye of the Tiger’ to ‘Somebody to Love’.
Are you looking for a wilfully anachronistic duet on space hoppers? Seek no further. There’s the well-pitched revelry of the dressing-up box in the cast’s on-stage costume changes and rapidly abandoned sight gags, as well as some first-class reworkings of some song standards, notably ‘Midnight Train to Dover’. This production ultimately stays on track by never pausing for anything, while also bringing us along for the ride.
The actors are perfectly attuned to the show’s loudly enjoyable silliness while bringing powerhouse musical theatre chops to the singing. Ashfield (The Book of Mormon) is a delight as a dunderhead Harker; Want (The Carole King Musical) rails wryly at being a Victorian heroine; Mitchell (Sister Act) makes for a huggably hapless bloodsucker; and Settle (The Greatest Showman) is great as a no-nonsense, gun-toting Lucy.
Settle gives the show-stopper with her roof-raising rendition of Etta James’ ‘At Last’ (sung while Lucy obliviously blinds a transmogrified Dracula with mosquito spray), but the scene-stealer is often Ciarán Dowd, breathlessly fun in multiple roles, including an accent-torturing Van Helsing. He’s ably abetted by Monique Ash-Turner (SIX) and Philip Pope. Meanwhile, beatboxing extraordinaire Alex Hackett is the show’s pulse.
