Dracula brings Transylvanian terror to the North Shore Village Theatre

The North Shore Village Theatre has brought the world’s most famous vampire into the community, but this time Dracula is here to entertain, not to feast on the blood of North Shore residents. For every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from Oct. 19 to Nov. 4, “Dracula,” written by Steven Dietz and based on the novel by Bram Stoker, will be performing at the Glenwood Life Center.

The Village Theatre is a local nonprofit community theater troupe made up of residents from Sea Cliff, Glen Cove, Glen Head and Glenwood Landing. Founded in 2018, the group has begun doing live performances in the last year following a coronavirus pandemic-induced hiatus.

Christopher Moll, the theatre’s creative director and director of “Dracula,” explained that he had wanted to do a gothic horror play for some time, and that it felt poetic to perform it during Halloween. He added that the fact that the Glenwood Life Center, formerly a church, gave the setting an appropriately Gothic and creepy energy which elevates the setting and performance.

“I have always been a fan of Dracula. I also love this genre a lot,” Moll said. “It just felt really cool to put Dracula in an old church, with the windows and the architecture in the space.”

The theatre troupe has been working on the show since the beginning of fall, with rehearsals starting on Sept. 5. Moll said that the actors have been rehearsing for three to four hours nearly every day since then, trying to give the terrifying Transylvanian and the cast of Gothic characters their own North Shore spin.

Moll added that it took some time to find a script that best fit with the theatre’s vision of the Dracula story, ultimately settling on Dietz’s, written in 1996. According to Moll, Dietz’s version worked best because it brings more action to the stage, with four or five locations and using more of the characters from the iconic novel.

The play did present several challenges, particularly with regards to lighting, stage design and special effects. Moll said that one especially challenging aspect of the play was teaching the actors how to work with fake blood, which presents a slew of unique difficulties for performers.

“Working with blood is just not as easy as you think it would be,” Moll said. “It was fun, just visually, to make it unique.”

While the first three performances have already happened, there are still two weeks left to watch the North Shore’s own performance of Stoker’s famous horror story. Tickets are available at the theatre’s website, NSVillageTheatre.com, at $20 for adults and $10 for students. For further information, contact Moll at (310) 490-4102.