Last spring BHS’s drama club put on an upbeat, colorful and vibrant production of SpongeBob the musical, which was a big hit with Beachwood students and the entire community.
This fall, director Johnathan Luster and assistant director Topher Helm are producing a spooky show for Halloween weekend: the Addams Family.
The directors and cast felt the show would be the right tone for the season.
“The Addams Family was chosen with the general ambience of Halloween season in mind,” cast member Michael Karas wrote in a message.
The Addams Family started off as a newspaper cartoon back in 1938 and has had plenty of television and movie adaptations released since then. The most recent movie version, released in 2021, was a sequel to the 2019 movie.
The most recently released television adaptation was Wednesday, which aired on Netflix in the fall of 2022.
The cast of Beachwood’s production will include students spanning from sixth grade to twelfth grade.
The prominent characters include of course the members of the Addams family, parents Gomez Addams (Senior Aidan Ward) and Morticia Addams (Senior Arielle Epstein), children Wednesday (Junior Rachel Kantarovich), Pugsley (Eighth grader JD Henz), Uncle Fester (Freshman Romi Balkan) and Grandma Addams (Junior Erika Marquardt).
The supporting characters include Lucas Beineke (eighth grader Eli Ward), Alice Beineke/ancestor (junior Zeynep Yazar), Mal Beineke (junior Michael Karas), Lurch (sophomore Noah Ahn), Cousin IT & ancestor (seventh grader Maya Karas) and ancestors (eighth grader Sarah Zhou and sixth graders Pooja Narayanan, Laya Viswanath and Zara Razzak).
The cast has been rehearsing almost every day after school for at least an hour and a half in the auditorium. In the early stages of rehearsing, the cast splits up and does their own rehearsal, and once they get closer to the date of the production they rehearse as an entire group.
In addition to being a great fit given the time of year, Luster and the cast members are over the moon with confidence that this will be a great show.
“We could not be more excited about our upcoming production,” Luster wrote in an email. “Our cast and crew are working hard day after day and results speak for themselves. It is going to be a great musical.”
Ward, who has the lead role, also feels confident in the upcoming production.
“I feel really good about it,” he said. “I think it’s really good because people on Halloween are going to want to see a spooky show, and also it’s just a great show that a lot of people will recognize.”
This is the first time that BHS has ever produced the Addams Family, although Luster directed the show with a different program back in 2018, and is very excited to bring it to the Beachwood auditorium.
The Addams Family is also a huge departure for the drama club, with dark humor instead of the upbeat, kid-oriented tone of SpongeBob.
“The comedy is actually pretty dark,” he said. “Compared to a show like SpongeBob where most of it is kid humor, there’s some implications [of dark humor] I should say.”
“But It’s still a show that you can take kids to,” he added.
