To say that doing a musical over Zoom was a challenge would be an understatement. Our first step as a production was to begin rehearsing scenes over Zoom, while the students worked on the music on their own, thanks the exhaustive amounts of work put in by our Music Director, Lisa Hertzner, who tirelessly created materials for the students to essentially teach themselves the music, record themselves, so that she could give feedback and notes, before accepting final submissions and mixing them.
Our next step was to record video of the scenes and performances of the songs with the audio, in a combination of students recording themselves individually, and recording with me over Zoom.
Finally, I handed a USB of all of our audio and video to our wonderful editor, Marlon DeSilva, who worked his wizardry and put the production into its final form.
What is most remarkable about all this is the tremendous effort and theatrical courage of this cast, who leapt into the different phases of this extremely daunting (and at times, weirdly isolating) process with their whole selves. I could not haved asked for more from a group of young student-actors.
After more than year of living through a pandemic, and suffering unimaginable struggles, frustrations, and disappointments, the work of these students is nothing short of remarkable.
The Addams Family has always been a strange piece of pop culture lore: this dark, weird, macabre family, who seem to have no idea how weird they are (and therefore how amusing they are). Yet, despite their strangeness, what makes them so wonderful is how unbelievably loving they are; especially Gomez and Morticia, who in many ways serve as wonderful examples of marriage, trust, and parenting.
At the end of the day, this is a musical about love: love of family, love of friends, love of partners. After the year that we have all endured, love is something we could all stand to have in our lives.
So, "let's not talk about anything else but love."
Thank you for watching, and enjoy the show.
Sincerely,
John Tourtellotte - Director
