Reviewed: Dracula and Adding Machine: A Musical Synetic's sexy vampires do not suck, and neither does a musical about workplace politics.

I didn’t catch Synetic Theatre’s original 2005 production of Dracula, so I can’t speak to what’s actually new and/or updated in this “new, updated” remount. What I can say is this: It’s just as smart now as it was then to graft the sinuous and sinewy choreography that is Irina Tsikurishvili’s trademark onto Stoker’s hokey yarn about a lusty Transylvanian bull who gets himself airdropped into a China shop of repressed Victorian sexuality.

Doing so opens up the familiar tale in a way that manages to celebrate its goofily goth notes of camp (all that “I never drink…wine” jazz) even as it underscores just what Stoker was up to. Take the scene in which Natalie Berk’s hot-and-bothered Mina writhes on the floor yearning for ol’ Mad, Vlad, and Dangerous to Know to come calling while four nervous men try to shut her up by shoving their giant Jesus-sticks in her face. Subtext? What subtext?

Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili helmed the original run and also played Drac, but this time out he simply directs, letting Dan Istrate get his fang on instead. Istrate has good, chewy fun here—watch how he seems to float across the stage by thrusting his fists out in front of him, Superman-style, underneath his black-and-red cape. The effect is that of a Satanic cowcatcher, and it’s a hoot.

And then there’s how great the whole thing looks, the bravura, self-evident theatricality lovingly coded into every detail; dollars to doughnuts you’ll not see more ingeniously wrought impalings on a D.C. stage this season. Before the house lights dim, Anastasia Ryurikov Simes’ set—a massive spider squatting over the proscenium, an upstage wall of webbing—seems maybe a little one-jokey, a bit on-the-nose. But she brings such an innovative range of approaches to bear on everything taking place beneath that great underbelly—billowing bolts of fabric, dancing coffin lids—that scenes shift with showy but fluid style. (Only one costuming quibble—the masked demon who possesses the dying Vlad in the prologue could stand to look a little less luchador.)

For those wondering: One of the ’05 production’s most buzzed-about set pieces—the moment the play’s violence goes from heavily stylized to suddenly and surprisingly carnal (with a little help from Karo syrup)—remains intact, and it’s still impressive. And still makes you wonder how much Synetic shells out for dry cleaning.

In turning Elmer Rice’s 1923 Expressionist play/acerbic rant about a schlub ground up by capitalism’s gears into a musical, co-writers Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt didn’t sweeten it.

At all.

Which, right there, is why Adding Machine: The Musical’s the caustic little gem of a show it is. But the fact remains: The play’s tone is so gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, its characters so assiduously unsympathetic, that the demands it places on both performers and audiences are very real.

In Studio’s production, directed by Loewith, it’s the actors who find the way in. The libretto tells us that there’s not much love left to be lost between David Benoit’s lumpen wage-slave Mr. Zero and Joanne Schmoll’s shrill wife; she laments the sorry state of their marriage (“Something to Be Proud Of”) while he fumes silently. But later on, as Zero sits in jail, there’s a moment—small, and refuted as soon as it’s asserted, but real—when Benoit and Schmoll connect (“Didn’t We?”) that seems to arise out of nowhere and attains all the more power because of it. Without that moment, the play might easily succumb to its penchant for broadness.

Stephen Gregory Smith, as Zero’s self-flagellating fellow inmate, gets a laugh simply by bending his flexible tenor around the words “leg of lamb” and throws himself headlong into a gospel fervor at exactly the moment the show needs a boost. Kristen Jepperson finds a kernel of intelligence in her love-starved Daisy that keeps the character from descending into caricature.

It’s the music, though, that gets into your head and stays there—a pleasing and diverse grab-bag of styles expertly tailored to whatever emotion’s getting expressed. The admirably complex but euphonious “Office Reverie,” in which lists of numbers read into ledgers become their own backbeat, is a standout. Loewith and Schmidt know to hold the melodious stuff back so it can make a big impression when it does show up, and spend much of the show’s running time instead tinkering with dissonance and polyrhythm in a host of small, interesting ways.

There’s an unhurried quality to some of the later numbers that rankles a bit; lyrics tend to take their own sweet time getting off the starting block. And the play’s climax is essentially a talky, here’s-the-message information dump that probably shouldn’t feel as vestigial as it does.

But Adding Machine is the real thing, a scabrous and inventively off-kilter critique of the unexamined life that’s that rarest of treats—one that’s both satisfying and sugar-free.