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Skirting vamp and camp, 'Dracula' beguiles

Directed with restraint, the well-known play relies on technical achievement and solid performances.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published September 23, 2005

LARGO - Horror stories usually depend on surprise. But Bram Stoker's Dracula has become so familiar that we know what's lurking around every corner, and we even know the ending.

So it's particularly impressive that Eight O'Clock Theatre's current staging of Dracula, a 1977 Broadway hit, turns out to be so thoroughly enjoyable.

There aren't a lot of chills left in the oft-told tale. You don't get goose bumps, and you never gasp in fear. But there's something oddly comforting about revisiting this classic.

Director Linda Woodruff Weir seems to understand that she's not going to truly scare her audience. But she resists the urge to turn Count Dracula into a parody, or to overly emphasize the count's eroticism, approaches that are too often used.

Instead, this production of the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston keeps the material on the well-traveled middle of the road. It doesn't avoid the implicit humor and the sexuality of the novel, but it doesn't overemphasize them either.

There are some fine performances, but beyond question the most impressive elements come on the technical end. The wide-open and flavorful set by Tom Hansen has opulent appointments against the requisite Gothic backdrop, striking just the right balance between elegance and creepiness, and transforms effectively into three different chambers within Dr. Seward's sanitarium. C.J. Marshall provides some nice lighting touches.

It's a complex show from a technical standpoint. There's even a bat that flies in, pretty effectively, from time to time. Curtain for Sunday's matinee was delayed by about 15 minutes while some technical problems were fixed, but once the show started everything worked admirably.

The cast, for the most part, is of the same quality. Trey Ryan, who's quite charismatic, plays the title role without a trace of campiness and displays a deft combination of menace, smoothness and intelligence. Gary L. Smith plays Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, with appropriate energy and intensity, and James Roth is appealing as Dr. Seward, the father of one of Dracula's victims, Lucy.

The only real liabilities, which are minor, come in the performances of Rhiannon Mooney, who is stiff as Lucy, and Terry Farley as the insect-eating madman Renfield. Mooney's job is made more difficult by the odd configuration at the Largo Cultural Center. Even the front rows of the audience are fairly far from the working part of the stage, so she seemed to almost shout in order for her light voice to be heard. As a result her performance worked better when she was in the throes of Dracula's spell than when she was the quiet and ailing "real" Lucy. Farley is entertaining as Renfield, but he's sometimes a bit too self-conscious and restrained to seem truly deranged.

REVIEW: Dracula, at the Largo Cultural Center, East Bay Drive and Seminole Boulevard, Largo. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. $17, $11 for students. Call (727) 587-6793 or go to largoarts.com.

[Last modified September 23, 2005, 12:28:03]