REVIEW
By Christopher Hartwell @SILIENCESEEN
Live orchestra, exquisite singing, and meticulous choreography takes to the Mertes Center for the Arts in this year’s musical comedy presented by the Las Positas Department of Theater Arts.
The Addams Family play is a rousing production by a talented group of Las Positas students who perform this play with incredibly intricate choreography, extraordinary set design, and superb singing by the actors present.
The theater department hopes that everyone can come and see this play as it really is a great two and a half hours of just pure fun.
With a beautiful story of love, adventure, and family bonds, this play hit home in the hearts and minds of the audience. So much of what was happening was all regarding serious topics that most, if not all of the spectators to this production could relate to. Yet despite it’s dark undertones, serious topics and eerie settings, it was impossible to simply not laugh at the humor that was abound throughout the acts. A truly mesmerizing experience, director Jill MacLean says, “Let everything else go, forget about midterms just come and laugh.”
The curtains open to the Addams family standing in a graveyard, ready to awaken the dead and dance among their late relatives.
Though these individuals that arise from the mausoleum are not main characters, they all have unique and varied wardrobes to match their differing personalities. The ancestors bring the background singing to the forefront of our attentions through perfectly executed harmonies and melody as the orchestra below stage plays the music that guides the play.
Aside from just the sounds, a beautiful set left little needing to be imagined, and yet such descriptive chorus was engaged that the imagination was stimulated to see and feel more than was present. On the stage, special effects were abound, ranging from disembodied hands to smoke screens to even the lighting itself which produced a clear heart symbol upon the moon as Uncle Fester went to his true love.
Alfonso Jesus Gonzalez played the character Lucas, the love interest of Wednesday Addams. “The cast is really great. Everybody’s nice and kind of like a big family. It’s really fun when you have no life outside and you get to come here and feel like you have a purpose,” said Gonzalez, a theater arts major.
Directed by MacLean, The Addams Family put this tale to a musical beat. A convincing portrayal of Gomez, the patriarch of the Addams Family plays a goofy yet serious family man as a father and husband to his kin. The accompanying central figure Morticia makes the stern half of the dynamic duo that makes the Addams parents so enjoyable.
“To get everything just all the parts and moving parts seamlessly, it takes a village. It takes a village, and I have a good village,” MacLean said.
‘The Addams Family’ will play in the Mertes Theater at 8 p.m. on Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th and 2 p.m. on Sunday the 30th.