Peter Anthony’s spectacularly designed, deliciously bloody production keeps spooky season alive in Fort Collins.

Halloween may be over, but nobody told the vampire haunting Fort Collins’ Lincoln Center. OpenStage Theatre & Company is keeping spooky season alive through Nov. 28 with a fantastically gory, sexy production of Dracula that embraces the story’s theatrical possibilities.

Steven Dietz’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel can be a little tricky to follow, but director Peter Anthony and his committed cast embrace its campy Gothic vision with such enthusiasm that even its most outrageous moments become part of the fun.

In addition to directing, Anthony designed the scenery and sound, both of which are splendid. Five ground-level scenic pieces form a semicircle, while four large rectangular panels hang above them, their surfaces resembling stretched, veiny skin. A bed and staircase lead toward a moon framed by two of the suspended pieces. The whole environment seems disturbingly alive. Wolves howl, wind rustles and unsettling noises fill the theater, creating an immersive soundscape.

OpenStage Theatre & Company’s staging of Dracula in Fort Collins, Colo. | Photo: Soleil Lean-Geddes

Rebecca Spafford’s costumes and MacKenzie Lowe’s lighting follow suit. Makeup and special-effects designer Victoria Villalobos has an especially busy evening, aided by fight choreographers Michael Travis Risner and Heath Howes and intimacy director Kate Austin-Groen. The results are frequently spectacular. One particularly striking sequence involves Jonathan Harker (Bradley Calahan) and Dracula’s two vixen brides (Sophie Kalevik and Lindsey Gwinner), who drag violin bows across his body until blood appears. It’s a grotesque, oddly beautiful bit of stagecraft, emblematic of the production’s inventive approach to violence.

Sponsored

Anthony’s staging is equally fluid. Ensemble attendants move scenery while multiple scenes unfold simultaneously, allowing the action to proceed almost uninterrupted. That’s particularly valuable in Dietz’s unconventional adaptation, which frequently shifts perspectives rather than following events chronologically. Characters discover what happened through journals and recollections, with the audience experiencing revelations alongside them. The structure occasionally becomes disorienting, but Anthony keeps the physical storytelling compelling.

Sophie Kalevik and Lindsey Gwinner in OpenStage’s production of Dracula. | Photo: Soleil Lean-Geddes

Renfield (Jonathan Paul) establishes the wonderfully deranged tone. He’s already skittering around the stage before the performance begins, then opens the play with a self-aware monologue to a skull he addresses as Bram Stoker, cursing the novelist for condemning him to perpetual madness. Paul is fantastic, twitching, contorting himself and scurrying about with unnerving conviction.

Risner is similarly commanding as Dracula, convincingly navigating the transformation from a haggard, withered creature into the towering, magnetic seducer of legend. Christina Marie Olson gives Mina unsettling flashes of instability, while Shannon Light brings harrowing strength to Lucy. Charlie Ferrie’s Van Helsing and Howes’ Seward are effective, although their rather stuffy characters spend more time explaining the supernatural mystery than driving the action.

OpenStage’s production of Dracula. | Photo: Soleil Lean-Geddes

By the second act, the performances grow increasingly unhinged, and the vicious vampire brides, with exposed ribs and blood-smeared bodies, push the violence into full-blown Gothic camp. The escalation occasionally undercuts the suspense, but I was having so much that I sort of didn’t mind. Anthony and company commit so wholeheartedly to the story’s lurid theatricality that even its most outrageous moments are fun.

There’s something irresistible about a Dracula this willing to make a bloody mess.