For those who don’t make a habit of seeing them, high school productions of musicals have a completely different vibe than those performed in a community or professional theater setting.
The energy level, on stage as well as in the audience, is more pumped and, on the last day of the last show, there are invariably tears shed, bouquets of flowers thrust into waiting arms and emotional speeches acknowledging the “unsung backstage heroes.”
Witness the rapturous reaction to Agoura High School’s closing performance of “The Addams Family” on May 4.
With David Krassner, the school’s new drama director, at the helm, AHS has a seasoned professional with an impressive list of credits in Los Angeles theater and television as well as on Broadway. Krassner’s connections give AHS’ productions a jolt of professionalism not often seen in high school theater.
For this show, Krassner was able to enlist the help of Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso, who helped design the ghoulish makeup worn by the cast.
But the look of a show means nothing if you don’t have the talent to showcase it. Krassner’s Krew had talent to burn, and it showed in Saturday night’s closing performance.
The show’s thin story is a familiar one: Mismatched families meet for an awkward dinner (“La Cage aux Folles”), but all the fun comes in the character portrayals of the ghoulish Addams household.
As is the custom in high school theater, the show was double cast. The Blue Cast performed closing night, led by the superb graduating senior Jackson Lewis as the dashing, epee-wielding patriarch of the family, Gomez Addams. Performing with an impeccable Spanish accent, Lewis hits each of writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s hilarious punchlines as if he were stepping on a live landmine, delivering explosions of perfectly timed laughter.
His rich bass-baritone brought an Othellian machismo to his character, especially on showpieces such as “Trapped,” the comical laundry list that is one of Andrew Lippa’s best songs in a score full of lyrical delights (“Like a bull in the ring or the moderate right wing, I’m trapped”).
Lewis was joined in stage matrimony by the slender, leggy Cayla Haarhoff, who made a perfect Morticia. When the two joined up for the memorable “Tango de Amor,” one of many exquisitely choreographed numbers designed by Leslie Glowacki, the cheers from the enthusiastic audience reached the rafters of the school’s mammoth Performing Arts Education Center.
Rachel Diamond, a diminutive girl with a big voice, packed a vocal wallop as Wednesday, the deadpan goth-garbed eldest child of the Addams clan, who has fallen in love with the “normal” Lucas Beineke (an excellent Nathan Brenner).
Kyle Brizendine was leaner than your usual chubby Uncle Fester but added a vaudevillian’s theatricality to his characterization, a Fester that Mel Brooks might have envisioned, keenly aware of the audience and not beneath motioning exuberantly for excessive cheers.
One of the show’s highlights was Fester’s Debussyian solo on the lovely “The Moon and Me,” and he also gave a splendidly timed audience mug as he delivered the show’s best gag line, a reference to “The Honeymooners” that many in the audience were probably too young to catch.
The cast also included terrific performances from Yale Coopersmith as the wizened, potion-concocting Grandmama; Hannah Finkelstein as neglected son Pugsley; Lee Gordon and Eliza Byrnes, fabulous as Lucas’ repressed parents; and the hulking Sam Jenkins, probably the best Lurch we’ve ever seen, stoic and taciturn except when it mattered.
In the end, we learn that the Addams clan is not really frightening; they’re just a little kooky, but a loving family just the same. As Morticia Addams dryly intoned: “Normal is just an illusion.”