Sitkans get kooky and spooky with The Addams Family Musical

Broadway’s take on the Addams Family is creepy, kooky, and altogether ooky, but the similarities with the popular 60’s TV show end there. This weekend, Sitka Community Theater is staging its biggest production ever, The Addams Family Musical — and while it shares the humor and macabre nature of the original, the updated show poses big questions about normalcy and what it means to embrace the darker side of human emotion. KCAW’s Katherine Rose reports.

                   

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“This is where I first saw her. I was lost in the park when a pigeon dropped to my feet with an arrow in it. And then I looked up and there she was. Wednesday! With a crossbow.”

“This girl walks around with a crossbow?” 

“It’s okay dad, she has a permit.”

 

Still set in a big spooky mansion. Still morbid and passionate as ever. In Sitka Community Theater’s upcoming production of the Addams Family Musical, Gomez and Morticia’s crossbow bearing daughter Wednesday is engaged, but she’s afraid to introduce the rest of the Addams clan to her fiance’s very, very ‘normal’ family from Ohio.

Director Sotera Perez has been involved with Sitka Community Theater since its inception in 2010. This is the fourth play she’s directed for the organization.

“This particular show is several orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve ever attempted before,” says Perez. “We performed a musical in 2016, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but we performed it mostly on a bare stage with a handful of actors. I think our cast was 12 that year.”

Two years later, they’re putting on a show with two dozen cast members, a larger than life, two-story set, and tons of intricate handmade props. It takes hundreds of hours of rehearsal and volunteer effort to build and stage a production of this scale. As for the plot, Perez says the characters you know and love are all there, but the humor is more pointed and less farcical than the 60’s T.V. show.

“It’s very reflective of Charles Addams original comics and cartoons which he wrote for the New Yorker,” says Perez. “A commentary on the glossiness of the post war suburbanism that was starting to creep.”

That post-war suburbanism is embodied by the Beineke family. Zeke Blackwell plays Wednesday’s fiance, Lucas Beineke. While the Beinekes represent the ideal “Leave-It-To-Beaver” household, Blackwell says it’s actually the Addams who provide the healthier model.

“The Addams family, for all of its eccentricities, is very loving and actually has mostly a fairly mature and healthy relationships between all of the members of the family,” says Blackwell. “The Beineke family has a lot more that they don’t tell each other. More repressed emotions, not as healthy of a dynamic.”

Perez says part of what draws her to the Addams family is their ability to embrace what is often perceived as the darker side of human emotion.  

“There’s a disinterest in our current culture to be in touch with or to embrace what we consider negative feelings,” Perez says. “That includes sorrow, and that includes grief, and that includes anger.”

Bailey Craig who plays Morticia says the Addams challenge the idea that “normal” even exists or it’s something to strive for.

“The Addams Family are always going to be perceived as the weird ones and super macabre. It brings in this normal family of the boyfriend’s family and you find out that they’re not actually that normal,” says Craig. “We have this big number called “One Normal Night.” What even is that? I think it’smade pretty clear that that doesn’t actually exist.”

Craig and Perez say that they’re thankful for the opportunity to work with so many Sitkans to produce a musical of such immense proportions, and it wouldn’t be possible anywhere but the Sitka Performing Arts Center .

“Being on that stage is unlike anything I will ever be able to describe,” Craig says. “Being able to be in a space where you’re with a bunch of like-minded people who also appreciate it in that same way. It’s indescribable.”

On stage with her theater family, exploring dark, hilarious places and embracing anything but ‘normal.’

 

Greater Sitka Arts Council and the Sitka Community Theater presents The Addams Family Musical at the Sitka Performing Arts Center Friday and Saturday at 7 with a Sunday matinee at 2 PM. Tickets are $10 at Old Harbor Books.