Loose Leaf Notes

After presenting recent productions in outside venues due to COVID-19, the first show back indoors featured a cast of seasoned players, including FCTG founders Casey Worley as Lurch and Emily Gruver (with a faultless Spanish accent) as Gomez. The show was directed by Emily Williams.

Still kooky and spooky, the Addams family performances stayed true to the well-known characters but were presented with a new story. Morticia (played with flair by Audra Jeppson) and Gomez’s daughter Wednesday (played convincingly and with spunk by Eva Rose Sarver-Wolf) is “Moving in a New Direction,” as one of her song and dance numbers describes.

She is engaged to be married to non-ghoulish boy, Lucas Beineke (played by Emily Grace Sarver-Wolf), and has asked her father to keep it secret from her mother, which sets up plenty of tension.

Lucas’s “normal” family meets the Addams’s for dinner at their mansion, while the Addams half-heartedly pretend to be “normal” for Wednesday’s sake.

The after-dinner game, Full Disclosure, which is “loosely based on the Spanish Inquisition” according to Gomez, leads to pandemonium when a potion made by Grandma (played with cheeky irreverence by Valerie Moran) and snatched by Wednesday’s brother Pugsley (played broodingly by Wilbur Coldwater) is given to Alice Beineke (played by June Bug Program Coordinator Resa Mattson) who likes to talk in rhymes.

It turns out that Lurch (Casey Worley) still only grunts, and Fester (Riley Wheeler) is a champion of love who falls in love with the moon. Add a walking dead group of Addams ancestors – played by Alex Woodword, Ellie Barret, Seyda Barrett, Seven Williams, Jovie Jeppson and Kaidyn Church –  and a dramatic tango dance (or was that a bullfight?) and you have a play with all the ingredients of a Broadway show, complete with chorus lines, punchlines, great costumes and songs, and stage props that include torture paraphernalia, which Gomez calls “instruments of persuasion.”

The play concluded with a message to be yourself. The entire cast joined in song, singing Move Towards the Darkness.

“…When you face your nightmares, then you’ll see what’s real, move towards darkness and feel…”

“The best yet,” said one attendee about the play at its conclusion.” “I always say that,” another attendee answered, adding “It was thoroughly entertaining. We’re so lucky to have live theater in Floyd.”_________Colleen Redman