After the storming success of Monty Python’s Spamalot in 2018, Keswick Amateur Operatic Society are back and rehearsals are in full swing for their 46th spring show: creepy, kooky and mysteriously spooky, The Addams Family. The award-winning musical is presented for the first time on Keswick’s main stage and based on the much-loved comic strip characters of the 1930s, created by Charles Addams in The New Yorker magazine.
Featuring the legendary family line-up of husband and wife duo, Gomez and Morticia, a cackling and witchy Grandma, the certifiable baldie Fester, the cadaverous butler Lurch and the loveably unlovable offspring, Wednesday and Pugsley; this modern musical comedy picks up the family at crisis point, where Wednesday Addams – the macabre, crossbow-wielding daughter of Morticia and Gomez – has inexplicably fallen in love… with a normal boy.
All is turned upside-down for the family when they host a dinner for Wednesday’s boyfriend and his parents, the straight-arrow Midwesterners, the Beinekes. In one fateful, hilarious night, secrets are disclosed, relationships are tested, and the Addams family must face up to the one horrible thing they’ve managed to avoid for generations: change.
The Tony Award-nominated score was written by Andrew Lippa (Big Fish) and the book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (Jersey Boys) and KAOS have been lucky enough to secure the production rights for the amateur performance following its successful Broadway transfer and UK tour in 2017.
Creative Director, Chris Briggs said: “I’m really excited to be bringing The Addams Family to local audiences this spring. The musical is simply riotous and packed with fun, catchy and beautiful songs, plus all the macabre comedy and ghoulish gags you would expect. Rehearsals have been going really well, especially as this year we’ve been taught Tango, Line Dancing and even the Bunny Hop by our brilliant Movement Director, Jenni Hutchinson, on top of working hard committing lines and lyrics to memory.”
He goes on: “It’s been great fun working-up the characters of the family and the script is so sharp and witty, we’re often struggling to keep a straight face in some scenes! Please do come along for an evening of kooky laugh-out-loud humour… I promise, this is one family you won’t regret paying a visit to.”
The 2019 season is the 46th year a stage show has been presented by KAOS, the accomplished, thriving and successful amateur operatic society founded in 1971. Performed in the professional setting of Theatre by the Lake’s Main House, the company’s local talent is put centre stage and last year The Cumberland News praised their hit show Spamalot as “an all-singing, all-dancing piece of mayhem which had the audience laughing and cheering at the end”.
KAOS’s production of The Addams Family is playing from Tue 30 April – Sat 4 May. Tickets cost £8 – £18; Students, U16s £8 and are available online at www.theatrebythelake.com or by calling their Box Office on 017687 74411.