Menier Chocolate Factory

Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with the Menier Chocolate Factory, a theatre that almost exclusively seems to trade in brilliant musicals I love and terrible farces I hate. I want to go into these things with an open mind, but inevitably it’s the same outcome every time. And following its excellent revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers - now heading for the West End – guess what’s next? Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway hit Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors isn’t that bad: it’s a goofy, gag-filled but fundamentally quite tame parody of Bram Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel that basically adds up to an old-fashioned BBC radio comedy.  It does have one genuine USP (US performer): transferring with the show, James Daly is undeniably very good looking and very stacked as the extremely camp Count Dracula. Handsome in a way British people aren’t – like a child’s drawing of a hunk – Daly’s weapons-grade American charisma does at least make the idea of building a show around him feel plausible when he’s on stage. But otherwise it’s pretty dismal. A hard-working British cast of four – including musical theatre star Charlie Stemp as meek solicitor Jonathan Harker – flit energetically between roles, but their Englishness only serves to underscore the fact this has the air of a British radio comedy of decades past. Maybe if it felt more American it might seem less dated. It is, to break out the obvious metaphors, anaemic, defanged, lacking bite....