Three nights of puppetry, stage combat and live music take over the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater this weekend as Orlando's Phantasmagoria troupe stages Frankenstein: The Birth of Horror, a Halloween production built not around a single novel but around the entire ghost-story dare that produced it. The show runs Friday through Sunday at 8 p.m., with tickets priced between $50 and $63.
The production traces back to a rainy June night in 1816, when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori and Claire Clairmont gathered at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva and challenged each other to write the scariest story they could, according to Orlando Weekly. That gathering happened during what's known as the Year Without a Summer, a stretch of unseasonable cold and relentless rain across Europe caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which kept the writers trapped indoors and, as Studio Everart notes, pushed them toward dark fiction almost by necessity.
Phantasmagoria creator John DiDonna wrote and adapted the script himself, building a production around an original music score by Josh Solomon, choreography by Mila Makarova, stage combat direction by Bill Warriner and custom puppets designed by Nic Parks Puppetry, according to Freeline Media. The result isn't a straight staging of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It folds in John Polidori's 1819 story The Vampyre, Lord Byron's apocalyptic 1816 poem Darkness, and two tales from Fantasmagoriana — the 1812 anthology that inspired the original ghost-story challenge — titled The Death's Head and The Black Chamber, according to the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
A Vampire Story's Long Shadow
The Polidori piece carries its own weight in literary history. The Vampyre, conceived during that same Villa Diodati challenge, is widely recognized by literary historians as the foundational story of modern vampire fiction, one that later influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula, per background compiled from Wikipedia. Pairing it onstage with Shelley's creature story effectively turns the production into a sampler of everything that single rainy week produced.
Seventeen Years of Central Florida Halloween
Phantasmagoria was founded in Orlando in 2010 by DiDonna as a Victorian gothic storytelling troupe known for blending dance, puppetry, live music and stage combat, and this autumn's run marks its 17th consecutive Halloween season in Central Florida, according to Bungalower. The Orlando dates are part of a wider regional tour; the show also stops at the Bay Street Players in Eustis, the Ocala Civic Theatre, the Athens Theatre in DeLand and the News-Journal Center at Daytona State College in Daytona Beach, per Artistry Magazine.
Phantasmagoria's performances combine dramatic storytelling, theater, puppetry and other old-school stage spectacles, with the troupe's stage world designed to draw audiences into the eerie atmosphere of that 1816 night, Orlando Weekly reports. An October review by BroadwayWorld of the touring production's invited dress rehearsal praised strong physical ensemble work, inventive staging and a multi-character original narrative framework.
Inside the Pugh Theater
The run takes place at the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater inside the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Orlando, an intimate 294-seat space featuring 32 abstract ceiling pieces by artist Tom McGrath and illuminated balcony lighting. Since the venue opened in November 2014, that same theater has hosted more than 190 regional arts organizations, making it a primary home for local theater companies working in downtown Orlando.
It's not Phantasmagoria's first time collaborating with a major Orlando cultural institution in that room. In May 2024, DiDonna and the troupe worked with Opera Orlando at the Pugh Theater to stage a contemporary chamber opera adaptation of the Brothers Grimm tale The Juniper Tree, composed by Philip Glass and Robert Moran, according to Classical Voice North America. Frankenstein: The Birth of Horror runs Friday through Sunday this weekend at the Dr. Phillips Center, located at 445 S. Magnolia Ave. in Orlando.
