Sink your teeth into a wicked night out!
When Leslie toured the country in 1996 with the hilarious 'Dracula' I was absolutely blown away. Starring alongside Vicki Michelle and the amazingly talented Micky O'Donoughue I knew then that it would be almost impossible to find another stage show as funny as this. And I have been proved right, nothing I've seen since has come close.
With the audience participation and endless one liners the memory of this great show will stay with me forever. I hope you enjoy reading the reviews and looking at the pictures on this page.Unfortunately even if you concentrate very hard and try to imagine how funny this show was through the articles you could never really fully understand its brilliance. You just had to be there!!!!!
Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton 24th-29th September 1996
It is a laugh-a-moment in this spoof comedy of Dracula starring Leslie Grantham and Vicki Michelle.
They are supported by an excellent cast who greet you as you take your seats and wander through the audience during the show, pretending to be in flower beds and crypts.
Characters who must get a mention are Micky O'Donoughue, who plays Renfield and Van Helsing, and Ian Kirkby as Jonathan Harker. With silly accents, innuendo jokes, garlic encrusted rocks the show is light, funny and entertaining. An excellent evening out.
Newcastle Theatre Royal 28th October-2nd November 1996
This is a gothic romp featuring heaving bosoms, pointy teeth and plenty of garlic sausage - enough to knock you out for the count.
This adult panto will have you coffin with laughter. The puns are horrible, the humour slapstick but the comic timing bitingly accurate. It picks up where The Rocky Horror Show left off with vampire transvestites, glamorous girls and audience participation to die for.
Leslie Grantham makes a spectacular Dracula who is tempted to leave Transylvania and move into Whitby Priory. He causes chaos locally through his bloody binges but has his megalomaniac sights set on becoming ruler of England.
He is hunted down by a trio of incompetent stake bearers. Micky O'Donoughue plays the brilliant Van Helsing- a kind of German Roy 'Chubby' Brown in deerstalker and goggles. Van Helsing encourages the audience to buy gingerbread crucifixes to ward off the vampires saying: "Everybody should get protection - especially the Catholics.
The finale drinks the blood of the audience participation as the vampires are hunted down and pounded with garlic and rocks made of foam.
Review from the Express and Star, Wolverhampton
Don't ask me to classify this. Spoof or farce maybe, or perhaps "adult pantomime".
The object is to amuse, and it does that in varying degrees from indulgent smile to bellylaugh.
Pre-publicity focused on stars Leslie Grantham and Vicki Michelle but the core lies with co-writer Micky O'Donoughue, who plays the loopy Dr Helsing as well as his much loopier cousin, Renfield. It is a supremely daft performance, childishly smutty and brilliantly off the wall.
Jon Darrel is the perfect straight man as Dr Seward, keeper of the asylum to which Dracula is drawn, and Ian Kirkby wonderfully twittish. Vicki Michelle and Claire Dallison are the delicious vampires. Leslie Grantham, hamming guiltlessly, inhabits the dark world as reflectionless Dracula, until the sun catches him out.
Garlic impregnated rock and gingerbread crucifixes are supplied to the audience for the final showdown- but will the man in black be defeated so easily?
