The audience gets to see the Addams Family out on the stage but all the cast and crew get to be part of a theatre family back stage.
It is that camaraderie that has continually attracted Neil Brooks to take part in the plays put on by UNBC Musical Productions. He's been in all of them, dating back five years to the founding of the club by fellow student Arielle Bernier.
"Arielle basically just said 'you know what I want to do? I want to put on a musical. Who's with me?' and I said 'sure, I'll help, count me in,'" said Brooks. "I'm the longest standing member besides Arielle. People graduate, they move on, some try it and then try something else, but I keep coming back. I'm done at UNBC now but I am still involved."
He got his bachelor of science in environmental studies (convocating in May) and is now on the job hunt, but one thing he doesn't want to do is leave Prince George.
"I'm from Vancouver, but there is just something captivating about this place," he said, and part of that is the chance to be on the stage doing the singing and dancing and acting he had never done in his life.
"You pick it up as you go along, especially when people are there to help you," he said. "Now we have a vocal instructor, a dance instructor, we've had live bands for the past four years, and now we get actors with a lot of experience. Usually it is mostly UNBC students. Most of the community people are like me, who were connected and still want to be involved, and now people have joined that Arielle met through her work on the side with (choreographer/director/producer) Judy Russell. It's making a nice big web of theatre people."
Two of those new recruits are Sandra Clermont (she has starred in major local productions like Hello Dolly where she played the title role, Nunsense, Sound Of Music and many more) and Bradley Charles (he was in Evil Dead: The Musical and the short film Behind The Reds in the past six months). They play the iconic roles of Morticia and Gmez Addams.
Clermont said she had a similar moment of weakness like the one described by Brooks when she threw herself into musical theatre. She was a correspondent with Shaw TV at the time, and came to the set of Judy Russell's ambitious outdoor production of West Side Story. She saw the cast and crew -- virtually all of them volunteers -- immersing themselves in the roles and responsibilities of pulling off a professional-grade play. She was hooked on the teamwork and behind-the-curtain community of creators.
"What you get from community theatre here in Prince George is a passion. The people do this to bring a story to life. That's the one and only reason, and it gets into your blood," Clermont said.
Charles grew up in this environment, following his older sister into Evan Hardy Collegiate, a high school in their hometown of Saskatoon that focuses heavily on the performing arts. He moved to Prince George in 2013 and his only regret is not diving into the local musical theatre pool sooner.
"It never even crossed my mind until I saw a casting call of Evil Dead on the PG Playhouse Facebook page. That sounded awesome," Charles said. "I knew these big plays were being done here - Les Mis, Spamalot - but I got caught up like a lot of people probably do thinking these were closed groups of people, that you had to be a member of a certain studio or whatever, or you have to be really good, but none of that is the case. Just go for it. There is something for you to do, there is a place for you in musical theatre."
The Addams Family has been a major hit on television, movies, Broadway, cartoon series, TV commercials and even a pinball machine. They started as a set of comic panels published in the New Yorker Magazine by artist Charles Addams.
They are what's called in literary terms a satirical inversion. That is, the characters are extreme opposites of normal life but done so in order to artfully illustrate normal life. The fictional Addams Family is a modern Gothic group fixated with death, monsters and the macabre as their common lifestyle, but blissfully unaware that they are seen as oddities by everyone else. Almost every moment is funny on some level.
What Clermont and Charles did not do was go back through the publicly available material to get a look at past portrayals by the likes of Anjelica Huston, Carolyn Jones and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia; and Ral Juli, Nathan Lane and Tim Curry as Gmez.
"I'm going by what the script tells me," said Clermont. "They have this outer appearance of wickedness and darkness but actually they live their lives with normalcy and a lot of heart. It's the opposite of regular society, when you think about it, when you have people put on appearances in public but behind closed doors they are something much different. Our challenge as actors is to feel that humanity underneath the strange presentation. You want the comedy to come across, but you don't want to be too campy about them."
"I'm keeping what I know of Gmez in the back of my head, but I feel very strongly that the script has all the clues necessary to reveal the character," said Charles. "You can't have a relationship with a character, you can only have a relationship with a person so we all have to find the person inside what the script has provided. They are unique characters but they are intended to represent real people: us. I don't think anybody in the audience can possibly relate to being a millionaire living in a graveyard in Central Park, but we can all relate to their family stress and the conflicts they face."
To help the character development along, Charles and Clermont are getting physical.
"For me, shoes mean so much. It really helps to find the character when you wear the shoes," Charles said.
"If the character wears heels or a skirt, I rehearse as soon as I can wearing those things, because that changes how you move and feel as you say the lines and move your body through the blocking," Clermont said.
Brooks said so much enjoyment in theatre comes from figuring out those little details, cobbling them together, and eventually arriving at the finished performance.
"I enjoy the exchange with the audience, when you do the performance, for sure, but the biggest part of the fun is the doing of it, being with people in the creation of it. You all feel the accomplishment of getting something done that was challenging. I get a lot out of the day-to-day process, the joking around, the little bits of time you get to spend with each person as you all work on it together. By then end you do start to feel a little bit like family."
The show stars Thursday and runs until April 9 at the P.G. Playhouse. Tickets are $15 regular or $10 if you show CNC or UNBC identification, available at the UNBC Wintergarden and at Books & Company.
Shows run at 7 p.m. each night with a 1 p.m. matinee on the final day.
