Spooky season kicks off with a show that viewers can sink their teeth into
- Ellie Ruel
- 15 hours ago
- 4 min read
19th-century Gothic icon gets a makeover in the style of Monty Python
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Juneau Ghost Light Theatre’s production of “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” is putting a flamboyantly silly twist on Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel for the October season. This comedic rendition, which opened last weekend, melds the sinister and silly in a whirlwind 90-minute show.
“It's really the same story as Dracula. It's just a retelling with a lot of comedic moments,” said Sarah Wallace, who is the sound operator for the play.
The production opens with four of the five cast members throwing the original “Dracula” book offstage in a dramatic flourish, but many of the original story’s themes are preserved. Typical characters like Dr. Van Helsing, Mina, Lucy, and Jonathon Harker make a starring appearance, with some gender-bending and role reversals.
An updated narrative makes light of sexuality, gender norms and relationship dynamics with peppy dialogue and snappy pop-culture references that span the centuries. There’s ventriloquism, flying garlic, a cardboard cutout of Bob Ross, staunch appreciation of hand sanitizer, and myriad special effects that give the production a campy feeling.
“I like to say it's a 1930s horror movie meets ‘Scooby-Doo’ with a little raunchiness thrown in,” added stage manager Elizabeth Pisel-Davis.
Dramatic “whodunnit” styled pacing is sped up by the cast rapidly changing costumes and characters between scenes. When the spotlight dims, the audience can hear a flurry of moving furniture, actors sprinting across the stage, and props tossed away backstage.
“The crew has to be really on it. They're all sweaty by the end,” Pisel-Davis said. “It takes a lot of coordination and patience and trust and a little luck.”
Davis’s role of coordinating the complex lighting and audio schemes is no small feat either. Fast-paced sound effects like guitar riffs or cymbal clashes and constant spotlight shifts keep the booth technicians busy throughout the production.
“It is a very technical show. The light and the sound are like additional characters in many ways, like they talk as much as the actors talk,” Davis said. “There's only a couple of pages in the script where we don’t do something.”
Many of those effects punctuate the entrance of Dracula himself, played by Travis Clark Morris. He’s the only actor who remains the same character throughout the production, allowing Morris to embody Dracula fully.
“I really love how easy his sexuality comes to him. I mean, he's eternal, so he isn't worried about these momentary trends of who loves who and what's right or wrong,” Morris said. “He's very Dionysian. He follows pleasure. He follows his interest, and that interest, because he's a narcissist, is in what is in front of him, what is moving and what gives him feelings of pleasure.”
Morris said the unabashedly appalling behavior of the vampire makes him a villain that’s easier for the audience to both cringe and laugh at.
“I think it is fun to play a villain, but a villain who we get to twist the mustache of, and we get to laugh at together,” he said.
One of the ways Dracula’s narcissism is conveyed is by giving the audience a more active role in the show.
“He uses the audience like a crowd, right? Like he's at a concert, wanting to pump them up,” Morris said. “It's been nice to have people in the audience and get that kind of immediate feedback of, ‘Hey, this joke landed.’”
For Morris, the hardest part of getting into character was working with the prosthetic vampire teeth while mastering the Transylvanian accent.
“We had difficulty figuring out how to get these teeth attached in my mouth in a reliable way,” Morris said. “Luckily, I’ve done a lot of accent work and I had a lot of training but I had to pull on all of my ability to try and do everything we've been doing and then do it with teeth.”
The play has been open for one weekend now, and both cast and crew say things have been going “wonderfully” with a good turnout. They’ve added a couple of new crew members, as well as a new spotlight director for the next performances.
“Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors” will run for two more weekends at the Thunder Mountain Middle School Auditorium, with Friday and Saturday showings at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday showings at 2 p.m. Evening tickets are $25 each and Sunday matinees are pay-as-you-can at the door. Tickets and more information can be found at JGLT’s website.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
