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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:22] Mo Brady: In learning how The Addams Family found popularity after its initial professional mountings, I wanted to dig one level deeper. Thanks to Jim Hoare at Theatrical Rights Worldwide, I had learned why the show was a popular choice for amateur and student groups. As he told me, on second thought, I'll let him tell you himself.

[0:43] Jim Hoare: Teachers tell me they love the show for all of the reasons I mentioned before. There's good opportunities for girls, large chorus, parts are fun for the kids, you know, like they can relate, they can relate to the characters. The music is challenging for student pits, but not too challenging.

[0:59] Mo Brady: But that conversation with the licensing house TRW made me want to dig one level deeper. Beyond all the reasons a school would choose The Addams Family, I wanted to know about their experience producing the show. How did their mountings vary from the professional productions I had heard about both those in the U.S. and around the world? And were these students able to experience something working on the show that I didn't in the Broadway company? Luckily, Jim himself was able and willing to connect me with one of the first high schools to produce an amateur production of The Addams Family, Rockridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia. A thriving theater program with not one but two full-time theater teachers, Rockridge produced the show as its fall musical in the 2017-2018 school year. And lucky for me, I was able to speak to both of those theater teachers about how their students experienced the show.

[1:55] Rebekah Hess: Hi, yes, my name is Rebekah Hess, calling from Northern Virginia, Loudoun County, and I am a theater teacher at Rockridge. So we have the unusual privilege of having two full-time theater teachers. We were actually at a theater festival, but the kids were off doing workshops and we started thinking about the next year's season. And as you do, we went on to all the royalty company's websites and just started looking through titles. And we're talking about what shows we wanted to do. And usually we do a fall play, but The Addams Family came up and I had never heard of it as a musical, honestly. And so it came up and I thought, well, that seems like a really fun, quirky show. Too bad we can't do it in the fall. And then Tony got this look in his eyes like, why not? We could do it maybe before Halloween because it would just be, you know, thematically perfect around that time.

[3:01] Mo Brady: So then did you like take a look at the script? Did you get a perusal copy? Like what was your step to make sure that this would be a good fit for your kids?

[3:09] Rebekah Hess: Yeah, we always get a perusal copy. We look at the casting needs of the production and we look at the students that we have in the program. And we had a lot of students that we wanted to train. Like we had a very, very strong freshman class coming in and a current strong freshman class, and we wanted opportunities to like train them in ensemble. But we also had some like really great quirky character actors in our program. And so we figured that would be awesome to provide them opportunity to train and be showcased. We always look at our season as a whole and make sure that we can be a program where we're not always casting the exact same kid in every lead role that we give a lot of kids opportunity.

And so we did, you know, The Addams Family that year. We also did Mary Poppins, which are, you know, they're very different fields in terms of the types of production. And so we were able to showcase a lot of kids that way. And that was a big part of it. So we always get a perusal script for kids in general and also for specific kids that we want to push because we have a growth mindset when it comes to how we cast our shows. And sometimes it freaks the kids out because we'll put them in a role and they're like, I can't do this. And we're like, actually, we think you can, but you're going to have to grow in order to do it.

[4:35] Tony Cimino-Johnson: I'm Tony Cimino-Johnson and a theater teacher at Rockridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia. Had you seen The Addams Family before choosing it?

[4:40] Rebekah Hess: I did. Okay. And what made you think it would be a good fit for your school?

[4:45] Tony Cimino-Johnson: To be honest with you, at first, I didn't think it was going to be a good fit for my school only because I saw the Broadway version. And as a high school, as an academic theater program, you really have to make room for ensemble. So I really didn't think that it was going to work for my school when I first saw it on Broadway. And then Jim Horne through TRW, after having seen my production of Ghost the year before, really encouraged me to read the new script and all the rewrites that it went through. Talked to me a lot about the rewrites when it went on tour. And I read the script and was like, wow, this is really cool and really different and isn't all about Gomez and the leads and allows a lot of room for creativity and for the ensemble.

[5:56] Mo Brady: I'd love to know how the students reacted to the show.

[6:03] Tony Cimino-Johnson: So I remember being a kid, I remember being in high school and hearing the show being announced.

[6:07] Rebekah Hess: Yes, it is an event.

[6:15] Tony Cimino-Johnson: Yes. So we have an end of year gala every year and we announce our whole season at once. And so we announced the show. And if you can imagine, like, you know, 200 high school teenagers screaming with excitement that we were doing The Addams Family. And right away they started preparing their auditions. I mean, you could just tell in the room that I know what song I want to sing.

[6:47] Rebekah Hess: In the original script, I think it says there's like 10 principals and then the ensemble. So did you have like 30 ancestors then?

[6:56] Tony Cimino-Johnson: We expanded the ancestor ensemble to about 22. You can expand the cast as a high school director to be really as big as you need it to be. This was our first production that we actually decided to make cuts. We don't usually make cuts for our shows, but this was one that we felt like we really wanted to do that. So our cast was about 40 students. And then we had an additional cast of improv artists that did a haunted house pre-show. We turned The Addams Family set into a haunted house before the show. They got to, you know, walk the audience members got to walk the haunted house.

[7:29] Mo Brady: I want to know what these ancestors looked like, because in our production, we had, you know, very specific characters for each one. The flight attendant, the caveman, like, did you sort of use that?

[7:40] Tony Cimino-Johnson: We did use that as a model. In fact, our choreographer talked to the students about kind of what they wanted to create. The students really got to choose like, who's going to be the caveman, who's going to be the flight attendant, who's going to be the nurse, and so on and so forth. And then we got to create those characters from scratch and work with the students to complete those designs. So yeah, I mean, they definitely were very specific personalities from a specific point in time.

[8:06] Rebekah Hess: So we value the ensemble intensely in our program, the story, like you can have these, you know, main characters and follow their.

[8:14] Rebekah Hess: Their journey, and that's all well and good, but it's like the ensemble brings the fullness. If we have a student who has a lead in one show, we almost always require them to do ensemble in the next show so they get the full range of the performance experience. Because I think ensemble trains you in teamwork, in synchronizing your choreography, which is huge. Like a lot of my students don't have any kind of formal dance training and so I push them a lot in that area because I do choreography. And also just like understanding how every role is essential and important to telling story. It doesn't matter if you're in the back row, you need to be as fully engaged as if you're, you know, downstage center.

So we also use ensemble to do a lot of physical acting and tell story that way. Like our ensemble tends to bring the actual stage to life and the set to life in the way, especially that Tony directs. And because I've worked so closely with him for so long, I also tend to choreograph that way now when I do staging in songs.

[9:24] Rebekah Hess: How long was the production process for the show? We had auditions before summer let out in spring of 2017. We like to have our students off book when they come to the first rehearsal. So we gave them the script really early and it took us about 10 weeks to get us to opening night. There is a lot of dance in this show. And so we did spend, I think we modified our rehearsal process, right? We spent more time teaching dance than we might have done for Little Mermaid, for example, or for Beauty and the Beast. Because there's a lot of dance and there's very specific styles of dance, particularly in the opening number when you're in Addams. I mean, you go from doing things like the Macarena to doing the electric slide.

One of my biggest concerns going into Addams Family was the fact that there was an entire dance with no singing, no dialogue. It was like a five-minute song and it was tango. And I thought to myself, oh my Lord, what's going to happen? And so we always do like one eight-hour rehearsal sort of early in the process. Usually, it's a staging rehearsal. We kind of like run through the whole script as much as we can and Tony stages a majority of the production. But I took it over as a dance rehearsal and we did eight hours of tango that day, which was a lot. Their very first rehearsal, now that I think about it, was with a professional tango dancer. And it was an eight-hour tango rehearsal where they learned the tango with our choreographer and a professional dancer.

And I actually brought in one of my dance teachers because I train in ballroom dance. And so he came in and taught basic tango to the students and we did a pattern that I could fit in and use in different parts of that song. And we also hired someone to teach Gomez and Morticia stage combat with fencing. And so we incorporated fencing into that, like a great throwback to the original Addams Family where they would just fight all the time in the show. I kind of pieced together a story in there, but it was incredibly challenging for the kids because up to that point they had never had to memorize and do that much choreography at once. And so it was a lot for them. But honestly, it's one of my favorite things that I've ever worked on in terms of choreography for that.

[11:55] Rebekah Hess: The beautiful thing about this particular production is that it focuses on family and it's about family and acceptance. There's a lot of empathy and compassion in the show. And even though there's a ton of comedy, it still takes you on this emotional roller coaster. And so for our students, when they first heard of the show, they were really excited because they understood the comedy. At the end, they were blown away by just how close they had gotten in this production because it focused on family.

[12:27] Anthony Cimino-Johnson: Interesting. In a way that wasn't principles and ensemble?

[12:30] Rebekah Hess: It's almost like because the ancestors are a part of the family, right? They come from the lineage of the Addams Family. Everyone is a family. And because we staged the show in a way that the ancestors were always a part of the production, whether they were moving set pieces or they were on the stage or they were watching the action, they were always present. So these ancestors were always a part of the rehearsal process. There weren't many rehearsals where it was just Gomez and Morticia. And so because of that, the ensemble truly felt like they were invested, like they were a part of this family in a way that a production like, like I said, The Little Mermaid might not achieve because you have very distinct, different ensembles that come on at different times and aren't really a part of the action necessarily with Ariel, right?

But the ancestors are always there with Gomez. They're always there with Morticia and Wednesday. It just brought our company together in this really beautiful sense and set us up for success for the next couple of years that I hadn't experienced before in high school theater. In the spring, we always do an all-inclusive musical. Anyone who auditions is in, that we find them a role, we give them a place. But we did make cuts for Addams Family because just the nature of the show required that it be a little smaller. And we had an eight-week rehearsal process. We thought there's only so much time we can devote to rehearsal in this. We have to have a more focused group. And I think because it was one of our smaller productions, it did feel very close.

And because it's the Addams Family and so many of the themes of the show revolve around connection and unity and listening and understanding each other and letting each other grow. We had conversations about that all the time. And I think it really did bond us as a group.

[14:41] Rebekah Hess: How did the audience respond to the show? They loved it. And this was a show that even our high school students came out to see because it was a comedy. It was our biggest fall production to date in terms of ticket sales. It really set us up in a net positive for the year to be able to take more risks throughout the year with some of our other productions that we were planning for the year, like 9 to 5. And it was a really a show that we weren't sure the audience was going to, especially high school students, were going to come to. This particular show just received rave reviews, and people are still talking about it today because they loved it so much. So it is something that will definitely go down in the history of our individual high school theater program as being a fan favorite, for sure.

[15:33] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Anthony Cimino-Johnson and Rebekah Hess for sharing their stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by Jackson Klein and me, Mo Brady. Please rate and review The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or at vpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. Our Patreon members have on-demand access to our archive, including full conversations with our guests and early access to episodes. You can support us for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening! Until next time!