The Stockton Civic Theatre is currently staging “The Addams Family,” a dark-humored musical comedy that taps into all emotions.
“The play is about these two families coming together,” said Dennis Beasley, director of The Addams Family. “Ultimately, the story is that we see the weirdos mixing in with the normal people, and what you end up seeing is the weirdos aren’t so weird and that normal people aren’t so normal.”
The play focuses on the Addams Family hosting a dinner for their daughter’s fiance Lucas and his parents.
The daughter, Wednesday, worries her boyfriend’s parents won’t like her and her family, due to their odd lifestyle and creepy nature.
Wednesday wants to keep her engagement a secret from her mother, who she thinks will disapprove of the engagement. She does however, tell her father, Gomez, about the engagement and hopes he will keep it a secret.
This puts Gomez in an odd situation, he hates the idea of keeping a secret from his wife as well as making his daughter unhappy. He is in quite the dilemma.
“We weren’t originally going to do this play,” said Beasley. “It was going to be ‘A Chorus Line,’ and we didn’t have enough people audition, specifically we didn’t have enough men, so we switched right at the last minute, and his is just a much bigger show than “A Chorus Line.”
The set for “A Chorus Line” is literally a painted line on the floor and a wall of mirrors, which is very different from The Addams Family set.”
The actors of “The Addams Family” portray the characters is very well. Some of the most memorable characters include Gomez, Wednesday, Lucas’ parents and Uncle Fester, played by 20-year old Delta College student Nicholas Jeffery Anhorn.
“I have been acting since my junior year of high school,” Anhorn said.
The first play he performed in was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.”
“I didn’t have a lot of lines. I had a couple, I said them off stage, and then I was murdered,” he said
From having a few lines to say and being murdered off stage, Anhorn is now taking on much more vital roles and playing vibrant characters such as Uncle Fester, challenging himself as a performer.
Anhorn does this with the help of the vocal training he gets from Bruce Southard, Director of Choral studies at Delta College.
“I’ve been taking a lot of lessons and a lot of instruction from him, and there are some things that he taught me that I applied for the first time in this show. At first it felt weird, but it changed my singing and made it easier to sing,” said Anhorn
According to Anhorn, Uncle Fester was a character that inspired him to pursue acting and performing.
“Christopher Allan Lloyd’s Uncle Fester from the film really inspired my pursuit of acting, my pursuit of theatre and my pursuit of performing. And to get the opportunity to have my version of Fester, to have my version of something that inspired me at a very young age, is over the moon,” he said.
The Stockton Civic Theatre is currently in its 67th season. The next show will be “Mama Mia,” which runs Nov.15 through-Dec. 10.