Dracula Is Back in Town. This Time, the Kids Get In for $10.

Last fall, Dracula took up residence at the Straz Center. The Bank of America Broadway series gave Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors a six-week run in the Jaeb Theater, with tickets starting around $91. It was, by every account, a very good time. It was also, for a lot of Tampa Bay families, a very good time happening to other people.

Here is the math, because someone has to do it. Two adults and two kids at $91 a seat is $364 before you've parked, bought a single overpriced Twizzler or explained to a nine-year-old why the man in the cape keeps falling down. That is a fair price for what goes into a Broadway-caliber production. It is also, for a lot of households, a car payment wearing a cape.

Now consider the same comedy, October 23 through 25, at the Lealman Exchange Community Center. Same Transylvanian chaos. Same ridiculous romance. Same vampire who cannot get out of his own way. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for kids 10 and under, which brings that family of four to $60. You could see it six times for the price of one Straz night, and depending on your children, you may have to.

Let's be clear about what this is and isn't. It is not the Straz production. That ticket price paid for professional actors, designers, crews and the full machinery of a touring-caliber show, and it showed. Beyond the Wings is a community theater: neighbors, volunteers and a lot of borrowed weeknights. Same script, different experience. Both are worth having. Big stages raise the bar for what theater can be. Community stages make sure more people get in the door to find out.

Dracula comes to Lealman through Beyond the Wings Theater, a St. Petersburg-area community company with a peculiar retention problem: people keep showing up when they're not even in the show.

Actors who aren't cast in the current production drop by anyway because they miss it. Some build sets. Some run errands backstage. Some just hang out with what the company calls, without a trace of irony, its theater family. Most organizations spend real money trying to manufacture that kind of loyalty. Beyond the Wings appears to have produced it with hot glue, late nights and a cast list that spans more than seven decades.

That range, 7 to 80, is not a gimmick. It is the whole model. A seven-year-old learning to hit a mark next to an eighty-year-old who has been hitting marks since Eisenhower is a kind of education no app is going to replicate.

The show itself is a fast, silly, gleefully unserious take on Bram Stoker's gothic classic: outrageous characters, mistaken identities and enough vampire mayhem to keep the younger crowd hooked. Running underneath the slapstick is the kind of wordplay meant for the adults in the row, which is how a good family show earns its keep. Nobody has to pretend to be entertained.

Beyond the Wings is also making a pitch that more theaters should make out loud: you do not have to perform to be part of this.

Every production needs set builders, stage crew and people running lights, sound and costumes. The company takes new volunteers year-round, and no experience is required. If you have ever sat in an audience and wondered how the doors on the set don't fall over, this is your invitation to find out (and occasionally to be the reason they don't).

The community calendar doesn't stop at the curtain, either. The company recently hosted a Spooky Treat Trail for families and costumed characters, and a Christmas event is already in the works.

Tampa Bay has big, beautiful stages, and we should be proud of them. But a region's cultural life isn't measured only by what plays downtown. It's measured by whether a kid in Lealman can see the same comedy as a subscriber on the Riverwalk, and laugh just as hard.

This month, that kid can. Bring them. Bring the grandparents. Bring the neighbor who swears they don't like theater. At these prices, the only thing being drained is the vampire's dignity.

Show: Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, Beyond the Wings Theater
Where: Lealman Exchange Community Center
When: Fri Oct 23, 7 p.m. / Sat Oct 24, 7 p.m. / Sun Oct 25, 3 p.m.
Tickets: $20 general / $15 teens, seniors, military / $10 kids 10 and under. Online or at the door.
More: beyondthewingstheater.org / beyondthewingstheater@gmail.com
Volunteers welcome year-round, no experience needed.