Category: News

Dracula: The New World reached its tenth production year in 2025, continuing a theatrical experiment that connected a familiar Gothic figure with the history and landscape of eastern Kentucky.

Written by Chad Hembree, the production began at The Spotlight Playhouse in 2015. Over the years, it became one of the recurring works associated with the Bluegrass Players and one of the troupe’s most recognizable Halloween-season stories.

A vampire story with a Kentucky address

The premise starts with a local coincidence: the region around Berea includes a place called Transylvania. From there, the play imagines Dracula leaving Europe and finding a new refuge in the American mountains.

The result is not a retelling that simply relocates the usual castle and villagers. It treats Appalachian geography, Berea history, and the familiar Dracula legend as ingredients in a new story. The setting gives the production a reason to exist here, rather than somewhere else.

Ten years of changing casts

Like any long-running community-theater production, Dracula: The New World has changed as performers have moved through the company. Daryl Harrison played Dracula throughout the production’s decade, while other actors returned for multiple seasons and helped carry the show’s history from one cast to the next.

The show also survived the interruption of live theater in 2020 by continuing as a radio drama. That change of format preserved the tradition when a conventional stage performance was not possible.

What a recurring show can build

A production that returns year after year becomes more than a title on a season list. It creates shared memories for performers and audiences. People come back to see what has changed, recognize familiar elements, and discover which new actors have entered the story.

That kind of continuity is one of the quieter accomplishments of community theater. The Bluegrass Players started in 2014, and productions such as Dracula: The New World show how a local troupe can develop its own traditions while continuing to make room for new participants.

Dracula: The New World celebrated its tenth anniversary with performances at The Spotlight Playhouse in November 2025.

Lizzie Borden of Fall River brought one of America’s most enduring murder mysteries to The Spotlight Playhouse in October 2025.

The Bluegrass Players’ production used Tim Kelly’s dramatic adaptation to revisit the 1892 deaths of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden was accused, tried, and acquitted, but the questions surrounding the case have never stopped attracting public attention.

A historical mystery without an easy answer

The lasting power of the Borden case comes partly from its uncertainty. The facts are stark, but the interpretation remains unsettled. A courtroom can establish what the law will accept, while theater can give an audience time to consider the people, motives, pressures, and gaps in the record.

That made the production more than a parade of period costumes. Its central tension came from watching a family story become a public mystery, then asking how much anyone can truly know about what happened inside a private home.

Community theater and difficult material

The production featured a cast of local actors led by Erika Howard in the title role. The subject matter carried a mature-content advisory, fitting a story built around violence, accusation, and the public fascination with true crime.

Community theater does not have to limit itself to one kind of story. The Bluegrass Players’ productions range across drama, comedy, musicals, mysteries, and original work. Each production sets its own tone and requirements, while the shared goal remains the same: create live theater for the Berea community.

Why the case still holds the stage

More than a century after the trial, Lizzie Borden remains compelling because the audience is still invited to examine the evidence and make its own judgment. A stage production cannot solve the historical mystery, but it can make the uncertainty immediate again.

Lizzie Borden of Fall River was presented by the Bluegrass Players at The Spotlight Playhouse, 214 Richmond Road, Berea, Kentucky, October 17–25, 2025.

The Bluegrass Players brought their dinner-show version of A Christmas Carol back to The Spotlight Playhouse in 2023 after a three-year break.

The production combined Charles Dickens’s familiar Christmas story with an evening built around food, live performance, and the shared atmosphere of a theater gathering. It was part of the Playhouse’s continuing effort to present holiday theater in formats that invite audiences to stay, settle in, and experience the story together.

A classic shaped for the room

Everyone arrives with some knowledge of Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley, and the ghosts who visit on Christmas Eve. The challenge for a returning production is not simply to repeat the plot. It is to make the familiar story feel immediate for the audience in front of the stage.

The dinner-show format changes that relationship. The audience is not separated from the evening by a darkened auditorium alone. The meal, the tables, the performers, and the room all become part of the event.

Why the return mattered

The production’s return followed a period when live theater had been interrupted. Bringing it back was therefore more than a seasonal programming decision. It restored a tradition that had become part of the Playhouse’s holiday identity.

Recurring productions can serve as markers for a community. People remember who they saw the last time, bring someone who missed it, and notice how a story changes as a new cast takes it on. That continuity is especially valuable in community theater, where the audience and the performers often belong to the same local network.

Holiday theater as a shared experience

A Christmas Carol remains a story about transformation, but the dinner-show version also highlighted the social side of the holiday season. The point was not only to watch Scrooge change. It was to spend an evening in the company of other people, with live actors making the familiar story present again.

The Bluegrass Players started in 2014, and productions such as this one are part of the troupe’s continuing history at The Spotlight Playhouse.

The Bluegrass Players’ dinner-show version of A Christmas Carol was presented at The Spotlight Playhouse in Berea, Kentucky, in 2023.