From the first notes of the kooky and iconic Addams Family theme music, I was entranced and drawn in to this new musical comedy. With goose bumps and a cold feeling in my chest, I found myself snapping my fingers to the repeating tune as I gave myself over to a morbidly magical piece of live theater.
The Addams Family at Cambria Center for the Arts Theatre delivers a classic story with a dynamic musical score, great performances, and the kind of stagecraft that brings us into the surreal world of the action.
The word ‘impressive’ does not come close to capturing the amount of talent in this ensemble.”
This perfectly entertaining and comically macabre fall offering features a ghoul’s gallery of local Central Coast talent and familiar characters. It ultimately delivers a darkly sweet romantic comedy.
We can all relate to the universal plot: a son and a daughter from two radically different cultures and families fall in love and want to be married, much to the horror of their respective parents.
The Addams family’s crossbow-wielding and brother-torturing daughter Wednesday has fallen in mutual love with Lucas, a normal and somewhat square son of a midwestern family played by Andrew Orr.
Wednesday is played by Olivia Hayes—late of Cuesta College’s Spring Awakening—with fierce determination masking a strange vulnerability. Wednesday shares the secret with her Uncle Fester and her father, Gomez, with the caveat that they cannot share it with anyone else—especially her mother, Morticia. Fester and Gomez are played, respectively, by the multi-multi-talented Nathan Miklas and Dakota Simpson, who also directs and fulfills many other stage duties in this production.
Fester decides to play cupid, enlisting the aid of five ancestral Addams ghosts, and Lucas’s family is invited to the Addams house in New York’s Central Park for “One Normal Night.” Anyone who knows anything about the Addams family understands this is a recipe for disaster, and we thrill at the ensuing chaos: secrets kept and revealed, magic potions going to the wrong drinkers, and bitter falling-outs between long-solid lovers.
Master stagecraft is exactly what creates the captivating atmosphere of this musical, particularly the sound and lighting work . . .”
The word “impressive” does not come close to capturing the amount of talent in this ensemble. They sing, dance, act, and practice stagecraft so expertly that the story becomes a living book in the imagination.
Emilia Gambucci shines brightly dark as Morticia. especially in some of the over-the-top musical numbers (“Death Is Just Around the Corner” is a personal favorite).
Sophie Rhiannon is a perfectly weird bratty sibling as Pugsley, and Dan Cowan surprises us with his Lurch, much closer to the Charles Addams cartoon than the ’60s TV series. Sarah Ruth Smith (also stage manager!) as Alice, a relative of Lucas, displays a wild weirdness beneath a garden-variety surface, and Gordon Silva as her husband is just the right counterpart drip to her splash.
The entire cast deserves much lauds and applauds even if they are not named here. My personal favorites are the quirkiest of the clan: zany Grandma Addams (Edie Irving), and Uncle Fester, a virtuoso performance by Miklas as the biggest dreamer (falling in love with the moon!). I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Miklas in theatre around the Central Coast (we loved the Great American Melodrama T-shirt!) and he has grown into a fine actor and master of stagecraft.
Master stagecraft is exactly what creates the captivating atmosphere of this musical, particularly the sound and lighting work by Paul Tungol, Gordon Silva, and Sophia Esther Grace.
From the first scene, the characters are bathed in an eerie luminescence contrasting with darks and soft blues that give a feel strangely like Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, particularly with the five ancestral ghosts (all amazing!). It was this lighting wizardry that really brought a spectral life, or magical deathliness as it were, to the world of the musical.
The show is a long one, at two hours and 45 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. But that shouldn’t stop you from seeing it.
Get behind the wheel of your hearse, hop on your broom, or saddle up your night-mare and make your way to the Cambria Center for the Arts Theatre while this ghostly cast and crew haunt the place for limited nights of wicked fall fun!