Shortly before Christmas, Nathan and I were meeting up with old friends in Kennington. We passed the White Bear theatre pub and Nathan mentioned the time we saw a musical version of “Dracula” there. I blithely said that it had been too long since we last saw an acapella vampire production, knowing full well that tickets to “Dracapella” were waiting for him inside a Christmas present card. Luckily he likes that kind of thing. He even dressed for the occasion:
We’d never been to Park Theatre before, although I kept meaning to book tickets for the whodunnits. It’s super handy for us as it’s a quick pop down the the Vic line and then two minutes’ walk from the station. It’s a new-ish build, so has plenty of toilets and is DDA-compliant, which a lot of the older theatres are not. More on that at a later point.
I booked this show on a bit of a whim, not realising that the phenomenal Keala Settle was in it. To be honest, the name that sold it for me was Dan Patterson as I am a kid of the 90s and remember that name being said every week on “Whose Line is It Anyway?” by whichever comedian had won the show. So I thought it would be fast-paced, silly humour and I was right. This show had one-liners, bad puns and pop culture references in abundance.
What it didn’t have, on the night that we were there, was Keala Settle. She’d been taken ill and her character (Lucy) was being played by the musical co-ordinator Awsa Bergstrøm with the script in front of her. I was a bit disappointed to not see Keala, especially as we’d been watching her turn in “Wicked” earlier that day, but we seem to have a bit of bad luck with listed cast members at the moment. I should say though that Awsa Bergstrøm did an incredible job and her vocals blended perfectly with the rest of the cast, despite the lack of rehearsal time.
What to expect of an acapella version of Dracula? Well, it starts out as a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, 80s pop hits and other anachronisms aside. The mysterious Count (Ako Mitchell) lives in his castle in Transylvania and is visited by trainee solicitor Jonathan Harker (Stephen Ashfield), who soon begins to suspect this isn’t a normal property transaction. Yes, he might have taken the rail replacement bus to Dover but, other than that, the plot is the one you already know. The ending is where it all deviates a bit and it’s a lot happier than you might imagine, but isn’t that just the magic of theatre?
Every sound in the show is made through the voice alone (aided by microphones) so ABH Beatbox is on hand to provide sound effects and backing tracks. It’s impressive because some of those 80s songs are quite musically complex and the ensemble is only eight people in total. There’s Lorna Want as Mina Harker, Monique Ashe-Palmer as Dracula’s servant Pustula, Ciarán Dowd as her husband Sinister and Philip Pope as….just about everyone else. There’s a lot of changing hats, Mincemeat style, as characters duck in and out of the story. The turnaround near the end between Sinister and Van Helsing is, if not slick, still remarkable.
The two leads are both strong – Ako Mitchell is suitably dramatic as Dracula and Stephen Ashfield plays it very straight as Harker, despite all the madness going on around him. If anything, Dracula himself is slightly underused but I guess that’s the nature of the book, as it’s from Harker’s perspective. It’s the other actors who really have fun with the show, I think – from Ciarán Dowd’s bantering with the audience to Lorna Want donning a mullet wig and bouncing around on a spacehopper. I did mention the anachronisms a few times already, right? The puns range from the “cracker-standard” to the cracking (“I just can’t see myself living somewhere with no mirrors”.) It feels like Tim Vine was involved in the script writing and I’ll let you decide whether that’s a compliment or not.
So, the songs are well-crafted, the jokes hit and the dramatic stakes couldn’t be higher, even if Van Helsing himself was wielding them. What’s not to love? The set and costumes are fairly basic but that works well with the frenetic nature of the piece. Some reviews commented that the songs seemed shoehorned in and I can’t argue with that but neither do I see it as a problem. You know right from the start that this is going to be an unorthodox version of the story – it’s Dracula scrolling through Tinder that gives it away. From there it’s just a hop, skip and bite to superman-infused Bonnie Tyler cover versions. If this doesn’t sound like your thing, then you probably won’t enjoy it. But if you like something a little bit unhinged, then lean right into it.
Incidentally, Jeremy Corbyn was there. I’m not sure what he made of it as I couldn’t make out his face once the lights went down. It’s a pity cause I’m sure some of the jokes about the current government might have made him smirk. But it was a nicely surreal touch to an already surreal evening. It would have been marvellous to hear the power of Keala Settle in a small venue but we still left the place grinning stupidly. And that’s what you want from an acapella vampire show, isn’t it?
“Dracapella” runs until 17th Jan – click here for tickets and more info.
