Reviews of Dracula A Comedy Of Terrors at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London

"Bloody good fun"

"Exquisitely silly horror comedy"

"Teasing out the feverish sexual subtext embedded under the skin of Bram Stoker’s genre-defining horror yarn, writing partners Steve Rosen and Gordon Greenberg deliver a campy, surprisingly sweet-natured story about the conflict between selfish desire and selfless love."

"Greenberg gives the piece a pacy staging, cranking up the text’s inherent melodrama to impressively ridiculous heights, while keeping up a relentless string of breathless puns and flawless sight gags."

"Sharing a host of roles between them, Dianne Pilkington is kept in a constant, breathless rush snapping between personas as stuffy English doctor Westfield and insect-munching asylum inmate Renfield, while a cross-cast Sebastien Torkia has heaps of fun hamming it up as an uproariously bawdy Mina and a forceful, gender-swapped Doctor Van Helsing."

"... James Daly is magnetic and mercurial as the cursed Count, discovering that eternal youth and beauty have left him bored and unfulfilled."

"Batty antics with a Rocky Horror bloodsucker"

"As a gym-bunny vampire channelling Frank-N-Furter, James Daly leads a superb cast in a gender and genre-inverting romp that lacks bite"

"There are gender and genre inversions galore as Jonathan Harker (Charlie Stemp, good comic timing) treks up the Carpathian mountains to Dracula’s castle."

"In a production directed by Greenberg, Dracula (James Daly) makes quite an entrance in lace midriff top and leather trousers, with the ripped bare muscles of an underworld hottie. He is bedroom-eyed and playful, in the mould of Rocky Horror’s Frank-N-Furter. It is a shame then that the story does not manifest the same danger and allure in his wooing of Lucy and flirtations with Harker."

"Daly is still a charming stage presence and his Byronic, gym-bunny twist on Dracula is amusing if one-note. There is lots of larking and some funny physical gags, although the scripted jokes can be less than pin-sharp"

"The five-strong cast juggle multiple roles with particularly fast work by Dianne Pilkington as various characters including Lucy’s father. The performances are superb all round, full of fun and mischief, but the low-hanging jokes of the script short-change the actors’ talents. This comedy needs sharper fangs."

"Give in to a very batty parody"

"Abandon yourself to the Mel Brooks-style mood of excess and you can have a jolly time in a manically silly adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story"

"It’s the kind of show — brash and a tad untidy, yet full of exuberant performances — that would make a raucous late-night entertainment at the Edinburgh Fringe. Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway parody piles up one fruity joke after another as it lays waste to Bram Stoker’s classic tale of the undead."

"Stemp looks quite at ease in a rare, non-singing role; he is, after all, a natural clown. Dianne Pilkington goes gloriously over the top as the fly-eating lunatic Renfield and Mina and Lucy’s bluff father."

"Have a strong drink or two before you go and abandon yourself to the sheer silliness of it all."

"Epically silly but not much bite"

"A knockabout spoof of Bram Stoker’s classic is lifted by its talented ensemble"

"Here’s a show that seeks a whole new meaning for the phrase “biting satire”. This amiably ridiculous spoof of Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic horror"

"Daly finds a rich vein of comedy in his character’s arrival in Victorian Whitby"

"Around him, in Greenberg’s energetic staging, the remaining cast juggle puns, slapstick and comically inflated parts. Charlie Stemp brings sharp timing to the naive Jonathan Harker, here a rather prissy estate agent who finds his blood pumping when Dracula slinks on to a sofa alongside him."

"Some of the gags are pretty anaemic and there’s little in the way of substance to sink your teeth into... Best, perhaps, not to reflect too deeply but just to roll with the epic silliness of it all."

"This is Dracula reimagined as a queer odyssey where both men and women are attracted to the blood-sucking Count."

"... in most respects, it throws caution and respect to the wind and concentrates on just having a very good time."

"A lot of the humour arises from the cast’s sheer glee at their lightning-quick changes of costume and character, their pleasure at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Their timing is excellent, their delivery ironic. It’s all very silly, you might even say totally batty. But gently enjoyable all the same."

"Toothless show lacks bite"

"Despite a talented cast, this Dracula spoof entirely misses the jugular"

"Toothless, bloodless and lacking in bite, this arch spoof of Bram Stoker’s vampire tale is not nearly funny enough. Written by New Yorkers Gordon Greenberg (who also directs) and Steve Rosen, it imagines Dracula (played by hunky Canadian James Daly) as a ripped bisexual sybarite."

"With four other actors frantically doubling other roles, often cross-gendered for broad comic effect, it’s a mix of British panto-style send-up and the school of schlocky, deliberately sloppy, American camp"

"This sort of stuff requires absolute conviction in order to land properly, and it doesn’t get it here. Though there’s some fun to be had from the cleverer bits of business and the grandstanding hamming of the talented cast, you feel they’d all rather be elsewhere."

"I’m deeply irritated by the way Dracula insulates itself against criticism by telling us how slapdash it’s going to be (“you’ll be horrified – one way or another!”). But mostly I was just unamused and bored."

"This toothless American Dracula parody was made obsolete half a century ago by Rocky Horror"

"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."

"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."

"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."