Four Seasons Theatre Company produces ‘The Addams Family’

The Four Seasons Theatre Company’s production of “The Addams Family,” which ran Oct. 5-15 at Skyview High School, was a celebration of the Addams family, whose antics have been an endearing symbol of Halloween since their creation in 1938 by Charles Addams.

The play followed Wednesday Addams, played by Utah State University senior Kenzie Davis, falling in love with and introducing Lucas (played by Daniel Francis) to her kooky family.

The play was filled with typical Addams family shenanigans, including Gomez and Morticia Addams attempting to keep secrets from one another, and Pugsley Addams trying to poison his sister (all in good fun, of course.)

Several USU students were involved in the production, including Lauren Sidwell (Alice), Max Allen (caveman ancestor) and Lizzy Swink (indigenous ancestor). Multiple alumni were also part of the production, including Brad Noble (Uncle Fester) and Chase Cook (light design).

“I thoroughly enjoyed working with so many talented people on this production,” Swink said. “Only a unique cast could play such a unique family.”

The production was a new, original musical written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.

“This musical has a lot of new songs and stories in it, but the characters are the same loveable, and sometimes terrifying, characters of the ‘Addams Family,’” said director Jon Rash. “It is fully morbid and insanely hilarious.”

Rash has directed or performed in every FTSC production since 2011, and said the opportunity to direct this show was a once in a lifetime experience.

“If you look beneath the nightmarish storyline and grisly humor, you’ll see something incredible and inspiring,” Rash said.

The musical included several classic “Addams Family” songs and quotes, including the traditional “Addams Family” music that played at the start of the production. The audience clapped along to the familiar tune, and several audience members laughed with delight of the old classic.

The same traditional tunes and characters seem to have stood the test of time, so what makes the “Addams Family” such a quirky and endearing symbol of Halloween?

“The “Addams Family” is so classic because the plays and musicals are always filled with a million puns and political and pop culture references, and they don’t usually name names, so that keeps the humor going generation after generation,” Sidwell theorized.

Addams, the creator of the “Addams Family” comics, has admitted he based Gomez, the Addams family patriarch, on a politician mixed with a pig.

Jordan Ames, who played the milkmaid ancestor, thought the “Addams Family” is so timeless because of their iconic and often hilarious quotes.

“My favorite in this play is when Gomez calls Wednesday ‘an irreplaceable bundle of malice,’ that is just so funny and unique to the family,” Ames said. “Second favorite is also from Gomez, ‘what is love anyway but a second-hand emotion?’ He says that in a lot of comics.”

Rash speculates the family has been so popular for so long because “they are the only ones who actually know what’s up.

“They don’t need the ‘happy pills’ the rest of the world seems to need all the time. They are unapologetically themselves and embrace what they love and who they are,” he said.

According to Addams, he based the cartoons and characters off of his own, real-world fears. He wanted to explore humans’ deepest fears and anxieties and bring them to the surface with his characters. By utilizing humor, his hope was to relieve these fears for himself and for his audience.

“I think (Addams) was deeply in-tune with what we all fear, and he used his cartoons to help people feel better about things, and those fears face generation after generation of people and never go out of print, so to speak,” Davis said.

Brickman and Elice’s musical detailed fears such as death, being lied to by trusted ones and loss.  

“The Addams family is far from normal, but then again, who isn’t?” Allen said.

Whatever the reason, the “Addams Family” continues to make their audience laugh and cringe year after year.

—Brianne Sorensen

@SorensenBrianne