It's Halloween time, kiddies, and two theaters are offering fresh looks at two of the scariest, spooky characters of all time: Frankenstein and Dracula.
But it will be easy to confuse the two productions since each is structured as a play-within-a-play, each features cast members who appear in two or more roles, and each is produced by a time-honored theater company located at Playhouse Square.
Four performers—Lynn Robert Berg, Jeffery C. Hawkins, Jodi Dominick, and Joe Wegner—create about 40 different characters as the story bounces from Dracula's spooky castle to the Transylvanian mountains and other locales. Throughout the piece, Van Helsing registers his frustration with the flawed players he has hired, while lamenting errant light and sound cues, intentionally botched lines, and a litany of other torments.
Although there are plenty of laughs, director Charles Fee fails to bring it all together in a smooth and increasingly hilarious ensemble performance. As constituted it feels like a collection of individual bits, some of which work and others that don't. Indeed, the biggest reaction in Act One came from the old standby of audience participation, a surefire but cheesy way to conjure goodwill with an audience.works hard to please.
Thus begins this story-within-a-story, as Mary casts her friends in her tale of Victor Frankenstein, the irreverent anatomical adventurer who dares to challenge the power of the gods and create the"spark of life." In her play Percy plays Victor; Byron is the Creature, made by Victor from freshly harvested animal parts; and Mary is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley herself along with Elizabeth Lavenza, the adopted sister and later wife of Victor.
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