For the Halloween season, Farragut’s West Side Dinner Theatre presents

Dracula, the Musical?, a play by Rick Abbott. The show opened last

week and runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 12.

This production of Abbott’s play is directed by Mark and Lisa Hatmaker.

This husband and wife team has presented many plays at the West Side Dinner

Theatre and certainly know how to use the “theatre-in-the-round” space to

its fullest potential. The action leaves the stage often, and in all

directions.

Taking place in the parlor of the Seward family madhouse, “a short gallop

from London,” the play opens just before dinner. Among the evening’s guests

is, as you might guess, Count Dracula (John Tuck). Mina Seward (Jennifer

Nave), the daughter of the Seward family, is spooked by the visiting

royalty. She is concerned about the disappearance of her fiance, John, and

she believes the Count knows something.

It’s the classic set up, but the twist here is that it is a musical.

Characters break into song every few minutes. Most of the songs involve

Dracula himself. Tuck’s voice works well in the role, though his acting is

a bit stiff. Since he portrays the “Prince of the Undead,” perhaps this is

intentional. All are charmed by his continental airs except Mina, who feels

a doomful chill from the Count.

As the party finally sits down to dinner, Dr. Siegfried Van Helsing (Mark

Hatmaker) unexpectedly arrives with dire warnings about Dracula. As

forewarned in the program, Hatmaker takes Dr. Van Helsing through a

gauntlet of accents. He uses at least three German dialects alone. The

juxtaposition of this against Yiddish, Swiss and Dutch accents creates one

of the play’s most endearing running gags.

Nancy O’Callaghan, as Nelly Norton the housemaid, runs through a similar

series of accents, though she uses dialects from the British Isles instead

of Central Europe. She moves smoothly from Scottish to Irish, and tosses in

a dash of Cockney every so often. O’Callaghan has a stronger sense of

staging than many of the cast. Her solo singing performance, “A Wonderful

Place to Work,” also exhibits her ability to sing in character.

The brightest spots of the cast are Hatmaker and Thomas, whose natural

timing and devil-may-care ham abilities inject vitality into this

production. The two enliven the choreography with their antics, working off

each others’ cues. Thomas hams his way through the “upper-class British

twit” persona, planting it somewhere between Thurston Howell III and Devo’s

Mark Mothersbaugh.

As always in a Hatmaker production, one-liners zip by at high-speed. They

are used conservatively in Dracula, the Musical, however, and only a

couple of them seem misplaced.