I was planning on writing more about AussieCon 4 as I still have stacks I wanted to say about the whole event but I went to school play last night and was so pleased with it I’m going to tell you all. Put on by the years 3 – 7 of the King David School it was performed at Chapel on Chapel.

While it was called Frankenstein Meets Dracula they were actually quite separate. Both of them were written by Carey Blyton (Enid Blyton’s nephew) and you can see a little more here. Dracula was first with a 20 minute interval before we met Frankenstein. I had to bear in mind that it was a school production and some of the participants were only in grade 3 so naturally they’d be taking out a lot of the scarey stuff. Anyway, I had a ball.

I’m reasonably familiar with the story of Dracula having refreshed my memory earlier this year with it but haven’t read Frankenstein for far too long. Dracula was fairly true to the Bram Stoker’s story with the deletion of most of the scarey stuff, the addition of a few songs and a lot of narration to bring the whole thing down to 30 minutes. Professor van Helsing was female and had a companion who did a lot of Buffy-style moves but both of them were terrific. There was the addition of an M & M, yellow one who was so embarrassed she was red and yes, she was wearing a red M & M suit. There was a lovely sequence where Count Dracula was mourning not being able to see his own reflection in the mirror and so we saw a pair of twins do a mirror sequence followed by a number of ‘twinned’ people doing a rather nice dance. I particularly enjoyed poor Renfield’s Dining-Room Ballad as she proceeded to tell us about some food she just had to eat.

Frankenstein was also good but I didn’t enjoy it as much. Maybe it’s an age thing as my niece (she was the flautist in the in the orchestra) tells me Frankenstein was much better. Maybe it’s because I’m not as familiar with the story. They did bring on Michael Jackson as a companion to Elizabeth (Frankenstein’s fiancee) giving them the chance to dance to Thriller and I enjoyed that very much.

I enjoyed the whole evening. The orchestra did a fabulous job and the cast was fantastic. There were few problem moments and they were totally outweighed by the whole. The sets were really well done. There was one young man who collapsed in the first few moments of Frankenstein and I do hope he’s okay, there were enough nurses and doctors in the audience to look after him.