Campy, comedic ‘Dracula’ descends on the Straz Center

Playwright and director Gordon Greenberg has been in Tampa for several weeks, putting together a production of his Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, which opens this week at the Straz Center (in the Jaeb Theatre). The 90-minute laugh-o-rama will stick around for a month and change before launching a national tour.

A high-octane farce that the reviewer from Forbes called “sexy and campy with non-stop hilarity,” this take on the Transylvanian vampire story was a smash hit at the Off-Broadway theater New World Stages, and at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory.

Written by Greenberg and Steve Rosen, Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is a gender-bending take on novelist Bram Stoker’s original gothic yarn, given an IV drip transfusion with elements of The Rocky Horror Show, Young Frankenstein and even Airplane! Five actors, many with Broadway, film and TV credits, play the many characters.

“Their job is to make it feel like it’s happening in the moment,” Greenberg tells the Catalyst, “and that’s the joy of great theater, is that you feel like it’s just happening expressively for you. And it could only happen in this exact way, on this exact night or day.

“You’re seeing a live experience, and you’re a part of it – your energy is affecting what’s happening on the stage. And what you put into it, you certainly get out of it. The audience is very much an energetic part of the show.”

Keaton Miller’s Count Dracula is cut from the Dr. Frank N. Furter mold – he’s androgynous, smooth, sinewy, pansexual and more than a tad … unique. In this five-member cast, men play women; women play men. The comedy comes from all directions.

“On a practical level, because it’s public domain you are permitted to do whatever you want with it,” Greenberg points out. “There’s no longer a rights holder.”

The point is, these days the blood-sucking Count no longer has to talk like Bela Lugosi. “Dracula the book takes itself so seriously that it’s easy to send up. The more seriously you take something, the funnier it is, ultimately.”

The smoldering sexuality, Greenberg adds, began with novelist Stoker back in the 19^th century. “If you read his biographical material, you get a sense that he, himself had a kind of open sensibility. Particularly for the Victorian era.

“And everything in his book was a reflection of that. If you read between the lines, it’s clear that Dracula has a thirst for blood, whether it comes from men or from women. And there’s something erotic about that, about just wanting to drink someone else’s blood.”

For Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, info, showtimes and tickets, click here.