The Parkway Central Theater department is putting on a show this week of the Addams Family Musical.
Organizing the show is Theater director Alex Moore for his second play at PCH. He describes his view of the musical as,
“The Addams Family of Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday With a little bit of a twist that Wednesday is growing up Wednesday has found a boy, a normal boy that she is interested in and is looking at bringing him home to meet the family,” Moore said. “So we see this idea of bringing home someone who your parents might not approve with a little bit of a different twist, while still getting all of the fun kooky characters that we know from the show’s”
Onstage, playing Wednesday Adams is sophomore Clover Fortus.
“One thing I actually didn’t do was I didn’t watch the Wednesday show that’s on Netflix,” Fortus said. “Mr. Moore, the director, he told me that he wants the show to be based more on the sitcom than all the other stuff… think that the Wednesday in the TV show is a lot different than the Wednesday in the musical”
She has acted in two other plays before this musical.
“In the middle school, I did Moanna Jr. and I played Monanna,” Fortus said. “Then I just did our most recent play, which was The Play That Goes Wrong, and I was in the techie ensemble. I wasn’t an actual techie.”
Paige Piromsuk is playing a new role for them as Morticia Addams.
“Morticia Of course, classic, you know, kind of a goth icon, which is something very different because in the past two years, I played exclusively men, middle aged men, so it’s kind of different playing a motherly figure,” Piromsuk said. “For Morticia one thing is that she really embraces the darkness… one of her songs is death is just around the corner and that’s like one of her big mantras in the song in the show”
Piromsuk has also had other roles here in PCH.
“The musical two years ago was Music Man, and that was my first musical at PCH,” Piromsuc said. “I’ve also done tech here. I’ve been on props. I’ve been props manager. That’s my main level of expertise when it comes to tech here at pch. The spring play last year, was You Can’t Take it With You and I played Mr. Henderson”
Shifting to backstage, Alica Bont is the director of the pit orchestra, for her second musical in a row.
“It’s just a lot of fun to be a part of this type of production for the students and for me, because it’s a very realistic experience. It’s just like, what you would do in a professional production and this year we have all students in the pit orchestra,” Bont said.
Working on hair and makeup helping the actors to look the part is Gen Wagner.
“I work together with several other technicians to put the wigs we designed on our actors and help them apply their makeup. In the earlier process of the show, we first needed to buy the wigs and makeup required for the show,” Wagner said. “The most challenging wigs and makeup looks came from the ancestors. The main cast use neutral colors, so having the ancestors in full color with both makeup and hair was difficult to balance.”
The themes of the show center around secrets and accepting those around you.
“The main, like, Cataclysm for the show is that nobody in the family keeps secrets from each other,” Piromsuk said. “When those rules are broken, the bonds do start to unravel.”
Themes other prominent themes in the show come from the interactions between the Adams family and and the Beineke family.
“It heavily focuses around Wednesday and her parents, her getting her parents to accept the boy that she loves. And then we see the Beineke family, which is the normal family that comes in that has Dillon Steele, who’s playing Lucas, the love interest,” Moore said. “Henry Overmann, who’s Mao the dad. They come from Ohio, and they’re a bit more conservative than the addams and so they are completely freaked out by everything they experience and then we have Kiera Anderson-Pittman who is playing Alice Beineke mother.
