Review: “The Ghastly Dreadfuls” hits the notes for spooky fun and sing-alongs

Atlanta’s home for all things puppet-related brings back an annual Halloween tradition, as Center for Puppetry Arts presents The Ghastly Dreadfuls. Created by the Center’s Artistic Director Jon Ludwig and Resident Puppet Builder Jason Hines, the mixed-media show runs through October 29.

The show consists of 17 Halloween-themed vignettes, some using traditional marionette puppetry, others using other creative storytelling methods or people. Though the vignettes stand alone, the show’s thruline is that eight storytellers, known as “The Ghastly Dreadfuls,” have come from beyond the grave to recount spooky tales from around the world.

The piece begins with a self-titled opening number featuring song and dance, with almost every performer playing an instrument. They include their clever character names, ranging from “Shockingly Dreadful” to “Simply Dreadful” to “Catly Dreadful” (the one feline in the mix who, naturally, only mews the whole evening). This number showcases one of the most enjoyable aspects of the performance: the impressive musical talent of the cast. Especially in “Introduction,” Scott DePoy (“Dizzily Dreadful”) and Jenn Cornell (“Joyfully Dreadful”) demonstrate exciting and remarkable musical prowess. The fun, lighthearted song sets the scene for the combination of quirky humor, spooky storytelling, and skilled artistry that dominates the night.

And what’s an evening of scary stories without subtle yet perfectly placed background music? The Dreadfuls take on the challenge of constant underscoring, with Robert Stickland (“Shockingly Dreadful”) on the piano, DePoy on violin and Cornell on the cello. It is so seamless, it is hardly noticeable. I can’t remember the last time I attended a performance with a movie-level underscoring such as this, and it is quite amazing.

For new audience members who might expect the company to stick to marionettes and sock puppets, the first story sets the scene right away for a varied showcase. A mixture of roll-by illustrations with a puppet on a stick, “Le Petit Vampyr,” an original story by The Ghastly Dreadfuls with music by Bryan Mercer, centers on a vampire but is thoroughly lighthearted. It is entirely sung through, inviting the audience to sing along to the refrain. The show earns its 18-21+ rating right off the bat (no pun intended), as this vignette features the evening’s first nude depiction.

The show alternates evenly between narrative stories —  sung-through or not — and Halloween-adjacent songs. Most songs are vaudeville-style with some tap dancing, like Irving Berlin’s “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil,” and there’s one haunting country and Western classic, “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky.” The songs provide levity when sandwiched between two scary stories, allowing the audience a moment of reset so that stories all land as intended and can stand alone rather than running together.

Spencer G. Stephens, AKA “Darkly Dreadful,” particularly shines in these songs, as he demonstrates a true knack for the vaudeville showman style. Whether singing, dancing or playing an instrument, his charisma makes me want to watch him lead his own cabaret.

Only three of the vignettes feature what might be considered traditional marionette puppetry with figures suspended by strings. “The Ghost on the Trapeze” made me do a double take as one marionette, seemingly absent of strings, swung on a trapeze set. Additionally, his flipping and hanging looked so lifelike, I found myself astonished there was someone above him controlling his every move. Unfortunately, some unrealistic tightrope walking by other puppets in the story breaks the magic of the moment.

The one story void of dialogue, “Le Danse Macabre” is quite the marionette showcase and perhaps the highlight of the whole performance. Skeletons and other such haunters dance around in a graveyard, dismembering and reassembling themselves in impressive feats of puppetry and again making me forget that each part was suspended by strings and carefully manipulated by an expert puppeteer.

One of the most singular yet ultimately underwhelming vignettes is a shadow film, “Exotic Ghosts: the Creepy Compendium of International Ghouls from A-Z.” With stories of creepy beings from cultures around the world, it’s essentially a rapid-fire collection of “Don’t do _____, or the supernatural monster who exclusively punishes the act will get you.” Some of them seem worth a whole story, but the sequence feels reduced to a grocery list and hardly adds anything of note. 

Another lower point in the evening is “The Horrific Experiment,” a melodramatic story told in the Grand Guignol tradition with muted colors and akin to an old-fashioned Frankenstein-type horror movie. Featuring performers wearing full-body character costumes complete with oversized heads and hands, the story is weirder than it is creepy, with an unclear plot and an ending that falls flat.

Each of the two acts includes an upbeat, crowd-pleasing song-and-dance number toward the end. Act I features a medley of favorite seasonal songs, from “Monster Mash” to theme songs like “The Addams Family” to classic instrumental sequences. To close Act II, performers reprise their opening song and then conclude with “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, much to the audience’s sheer delight. No one had to tell them to sing along to “Time Warp” at the end — it happened naturally.

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Sally Henry Fuller is a theater nerd and performing arts journalist with a passion for telling people’s stories. When she’s not interviewing artists, you can find her in a local coffee shop or watching a musical with her husband.