Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.
Because there’s little we need more right now than laughter, the best medicine, natch and that’s what we get - liberally laced with groans, because no joke is too daddish for Dan Patterson and Jez Bond - with a smattering of always welcome corpsing and fourth-wall breaches thrown in for good measure. Yes, Dracapella has a fair chunk of panto stirred into its mix alongside Airplane! gags and even a soupçon of Young Frankenstein, but Christmas is a time for tradition after all.
The wild card in what might be merely a diverting, if somewhat predictable show veering a little too closely to the sketches that habitually closed The Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials, is the singing. Squeezed in between the avalanche of jokes and japes, the cast knock out banger after banger to the accompaniment of the award-winning ABH Beatbox, who proves far less irritating than expected, in fact, really rather good. Who needs AI to replace musicians when a man and a mic can do it just as well?
“Somebody to Love”, “Holding Out for a Hero” and “We Found Love” along with plenty more turn up and (this is always crucial for a production of this kind) they are sung beautifully, delivered in farcical circumstances sure, but there’s no compromise on the quality of the vocals.
The girls lead the way (in a silly show like this, the cast always comprise boys and girls), Keala Settle (Lucy), Lorna Want (Mina) and Monique Ashe-Palmer (Pustula) just about reining in the belt before it blasts our ears off - thrilling stuff indeed!
The boys aren’t far behind on the singing, but probably get a greater concentration of laughs. Ako Mitchell vamps it up as a seductive Dracula, Stephen Ashfield is a dim but lovable Jonathan Harker, Philip Pope a tongue-tied Holmwood and Ciarán Dowd (pictured above) a lascivious Sinister, doubling as a far too Dutch Van Helsing. That they’re all having a whale of a time themselves certainly elevates our mood.
The characters, basic outline of the story and mise-en-scène are reassuringly familiar, indeed, horror spoofs like Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Love at First Bite make up almost a genre of its own, giving us an anchor point from which the wild digressions and deliberate anachronisms can take flight. So every cliché of Bram Stoker’s novel along with plenty more imported from elsewhere in the Victorian canon, proves just more grist to the humour mill.
There are no points being made here, no topical references, no biting satire nor edgy presentation for all the beatboxing musical novelty. It’s just a good ol' night out, punctuated with old fave songs well sung, illuminated by winning performances and laced with gags that pour down at such a rate that there’s no time to consider the merits of the last one because the next is right on you.
Descending into the underworld for the Tube ride home, I reflected that the marriage of good music and bad jokes, like the mysterious Count himself, will never die.
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