Kate Hamill’s adaptation is a wild ride with an all-star cast and cinematic staging

Talk about a wet cleanup: By the time the final blackout arrives for Kate Hamill’s version of Dracula, there’s enough blood on the stage of the Arvada Center to keep Vitalant going for the rest of the year.

The full title is Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really, and Hamill’s script takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 story and uses it both as an indictment of the patriarchy and a platform for a good deal of gore and comedy. Directed by Carolyn Howarth and staged in the Arvada Center’s Black Box Theatre, the two-act play benefits from a particularly strong cast and a high-end technical execution that gives it a decidedly cinematic appeal.

Scenic Designer Tina Anderson uses every inch of stage space for a set that’s high and wide, with flowing curtains upstage and a central arch in front of a layered platform for most of the action. Candelabras bracket the stage, the ushers are in capes and the lighting by Jon Olson keeps us bathed in grays, blacks and reds throughout. And the sound design by Jason Ducat is remarkable — from cawing crows to whispering voices to Dracula himself as the voice of God.

Smoke machines run double overtime.

Scene set, we’re introduced to Renfield in a London asylum scribbling on the floor a bastardized version of The Lord’s Prayer. Jessica Austgen paints a portrait of the Renfield character that’s disturbingly funny and impactful. Channeling Gollum and Eliza Doolittle, Austgen skitters around on all fours barefoot, eating flies and spiders and cackling maniacally while spewing an endless stream of seeming nonsense in a thick cockney accent.

Seward, her doctor in the loony bin, is played by Colorado favorite Gareth Saxe. He’s a well-meaning guy but a mansplainer of the first degree and a bit of a twit at that. Hamill puts the character in the unenviable position as the one with all the cringy lines prompting modern woke reactions, and it comes to a head when he later meets a (gasp) female Doctor Van Helsing (Prentiss Benjamin – a newcomer to the Colorado stage).

Noelia Antweiler, left, as Lucy and Annie Barbour as Mina in the Arvada Center production of ‘Dracula …’ | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

The Transylvania trio

Meanwhile, lawyer Harker (Lance Rasmussen) is heading off to Romania to meet some count who’s looking to move to England. Taking leave of his pregnant wife, Mina (Annie Barbour), he lands at Dracula’s castle where he meets the head bloodsucker himself — a delightfully snooty Geoffrey Kent dressed all in white. Rasmussen is great as the quintessential put-upon Englishman of the “now-see-here-my-good-man” type, and Dracula plays him like a fiddle.

It’s here that Hamill starts to hit her stride and demonstrate the humorous tone underlying the coming horror. Kent plays Dracula as a man in full, a strutting peacock well-assured of his place in the world after successfully navigating it as a vampire for hundreds of years. We all know what he is, but Harker doesn’t, and Kent draws icky mirth as he flits through their meeting scene delivering cryptic zingers.

Mel Schaffer and Katrina Stelk tag-team as his hissing, easily irritated servants (his “wives” as we later learn). What might otherwise be minor characters are fully formed in a pair of great performances as physical as they are psychological. No matter what’s going on, they’re always up to something or moving around in interesting ways. In one scene, Stelk scuttles around in a full gymnastic bridge. (She also manages the intimacy direction in a show that needs a lot of it.)

It was great to see Schaffer again — a young actor who impressed in last spring’s Catamounts’ production of Impossible Things. Playing three different characters, it’s an athletic performance they have a great deal of fun with.

Mel Schaffer and Geoffrey Kent | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

Blood & revenge

At the heart of the whole revenge-fantasy thing is the relationship between Mina and her BFF Lucy (Noelia Antweiler). Howarth could hardly have chosen better with these two actors, who establish the depth of their friendship immediately in a playful scene where they dish on men, sex and babies.

Hamill’s aim is to elevate Mina from a husband-obeying mouse to a full-fledged vampire hunter, and Barbour is more than up to the task. On the flip side is Antweiler, whose Lucy would fit right in with the Carrie Bradshaw crew until Dracula has his way with her and she descends into madness.

By the time Dracula hits England ready to rule the town, we’ve got all the pieces in place for the coming showdown. It’s a bats-to-the-wall second act that delivers plenty of shocks and truly gruesome (if not particularly scary) scenes. It’s a shame Hamill didn’t strip 20 minutes or so out of the script here, since over-long monologuing by Dracula — and Renfield particularly — bogs things down in spots.

As Van Helsing, Benjamin has plenty of ball-squeezing lines to put all three men in their place. With a cowboy accent and getup, Van Helsing as a woman is a potent bearer of modern ideas about gender roles. (The performance reminded me of Sandy from SpongeBob SquarePants with a healthy dose of Yosemite Sam and Indiana Jones.)

Van Helsing is full of bluster and portent as she warns of what’s to come. The role is a bit two-dimensional, but Benjamin makes the most of it and delivers the feminist messages with authority.

Prentiss Benjamin as Van Helsing | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

Blood feud

The ending of Dracula is the coming together of a number of great performances and impressive, inventive stagecraft. Chief among the surprises is the dead-ish Lucy descending from the ceiling on red silks. In addition to her acting bona fides, Antweiler is also a professional aerialist who specializes in silks performance. Howarth’s decision to illustrate Lucy’s final scene in this way was risky — was it done only because it was possible with Antweiler in the cast? — but I think it paid off.

We’ve seen the stereotypical scene plenty of times where the coffin lid is lifted and the wooden stake deployed. To combine the sensuality of the silks with the ravings of a recently created vamp turned up the volume while giving Lucy a memorable and appropriately bizarre exit.

Costume Designer Clare Henkel always delivers bold outfits, but here she simply has a field day. The most fun is had with Dracula and Van Helsing. With a bit more glitter, Kent could easily star in a Liberace biopic with his three-piece white suit with cravat and cape. Benjamin is all straps and buckles and holsters full of wooden stakes. She packs more garlic than an Olive Garden, which she produces from a satchel in full bunches as needed.

Renfield’s outfit is also spot-on. It’s a suggestion of a straitjacket without the pinned sleeves and looks like it was made out of an old army tent. There’s a wacky helmet, some kind of codpiece and a leather gorget-style collar to complete the look.

Jessica Austgen as Renfield | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

Schaffer and Stelk start out with giant platform boots and skimpy white outfits complementing their boss. After appearing for most of the show in clothes befitting a pregnant woman, Barbour shows up at the end with big-ass boots, burly capris, a frilly-collared tunic and a loaded stake holster to strike fear into any undead heart.

Despite some run-on dialogue in the script, Hamill’s Dracula is a ton of fun. The Arvada Center team has put together an engaging, visually stunning and altogether creepy and violent entry for the Halloween season.

Now bust out the mops and get ready for the next show – it runs through Nov. 3.