Much as Dracula had a mysterious mental grip on his faithful servant Renfield, so he has a hold on Orlando-rooted actors Paul Vogt and Kelly Bashar. But while the hapless Renfield was forced to subsist on a diet of bugs while procuring victims for the Count, Vogt’s and Bashar’s servitude amounts to revisiting the world of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors.
The duo are in the midst of a lengthy Orlando run of the spooky comedic farce — a satirical spin on Bram Stoker’s canonical vampire tale — that sees them each assuming multiple roles nightly. The play, by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, is a madcap rampage through the Dracula mythos, with plenty of room for improv and audience interaction along the way. As well, the play sees several characters tweaked and gender-flipped — for instance, Vogt does his best Mina Westfeldt, while Bashar injects new life into the aforementioned Renfield and the stuffed-shirt Dr. Westfeldt. Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors has been praised as “a bloody good time” by the Orlando Sentinel’s Matt Palm. And he seems to be onto something.
But what is it about Dracula that keeps the duo answering his call and coming back for more? It’s down to the pranks, not the plasma.
“It’s just such a fun show. We’ve both been doing it literally for a year now, and I’m not sick of it. I always say it’s kind of like a ride that once it starts, you’ve just got to hang on and keep going till the end,” says Bashar. “With different actors, with different directors, in different cities, you find different things to respond to, or different things you might want to highlight.”
“We’ve done it in five different cities that are pretty big, and each one had its own energy and its own style,” says Vogt. “This space is so intimate that we get to do things out in the audience, and there are times they talk back.”
Though there’s always been a degree of gender fluidity baked into the Dracula tale (Renfield’s devotion to and jealousy of Dracula’s wandering eye, some simmering sexual tension between Jonathan Harker and Dracula), this play cranks the levels up to 11 with several actors in the small cast playing multiple roles as both men and women. Vogt takes on Mina and Van Helsing, while Bashar goes full-bore with Renfield, Dr. Westfeldt and even the doomed ship captain from early in the story.
“I was part of an all-women’s improv Shakespeare group back in L.A., where we would play all the roles. So I already just loved playing, I’ll say it this way, terrible men,” says Bashar of leaning into the clueless misogyny of Westfeldt. “The fact that I’m a woman playing this man, saying things that no woman would want to hear or put up with, I just feel so free in going far with it, and I think the audiences really respond to that.”
“I love telling people, ‘Kelly and I are on a show. She plays all the men. I play all the women.’ That piques people’s interest,” says Vogt. “And why shouldn’t there be shows that women get to play men? There’s just not enough of them.”
The breakneck pace of the play and the logistical challenges of costume and persona challenges keep things interesting for these two seasoned performers. Their interplay comes easily not just from the story, but the shared creative history between the two, especially in the improv sphere — all the way back to first meeting in the early 1990s doing Streetmosphere at the then-Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park.
“Both Paul and I come from backgrounds of improv, sketch, so flipping into a new character quickly is in both of our wheelhouses. But to have it so supported with costuming,” says Bashar, praising the creatives behind the scenes of the play, “to have these quick changes written into the show that truly make people gasp is such a gift.”
Occasionally though, wardrobe malfunctions — in the classical sense of the term — are inevitable. A recent missing-wig mishap in Orlando is freshly on their minds.
“To set the stage, Kelly talks as one character and then puts a little wig on top of her head and talks as the other, and has a full-on conversation by herself as we’re all watching,” says Vogt.
“So I go to get this wig handed to me. No one’s there. Dresser gone. So I run offstage, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, maybe it’s just right here.’ It’s nowhere to be seen,” remembers Bashar. “So I look on the prop table, and there’s a doily. So I grab it and I walk on stage with a doily on my head, and I do the whole scene using a doily instead of a wig. And stage is just staring at me, trying not to laugh.”
“I laughed. I was Harvey Korman on Carol Burnett,” confesses Vogt. “I think I had the next line, and I couldn’t even get it out.”
Similarly, the twosome are quick to praise the Orlando cast they are working with for the local run of Dracula.
“We’ve both worked with Trevor [Spence, who plays Jonathan Harker and several others], who’s been in the show before, and then with Fredy [Ruiz, Dracula] we all have mutual friends. Regina [Fernandez, who plays Lucy Westfeldt and others], she’s with my agency,” says Vogt of the family-reunion nature of these shows. “So we all have these connections so that automatically we’re all clicked in, and now for the five of us, this is our world.”
The world of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is one that exists poised at the Venn intersection of classic horror, gothic melodrama and high camp.
“I think we’re hitting a lot of the same vibes as a Rocky Horror,” says Bashar. “It’s really funny. It’s sexy in some parts, and we’ve got a great Dracula bar to go to afterwards.”
“There’s something about the gothic style and camp. The gothic style is so over-the-top and big and dramatic. And so to make it camp, you’re just ratcheting up a couple more notches. You don’t have that far to go to turn gothic realism into a camp moment,” ponders Vogt. “And that’s my Ph.D. dissertation.”
Various times and dates, through Nov. 8, Goldman Theater, Lowndes Shakespeare Center, 812 E. Rollins St., orlandoshakes.org, $52-$85.
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This article appears in Oct. 21-27, 2026.