Both Creepy & Cooky

The Addams Family is no small show for anyone, much less a scenic designer who also doubles as a props master, scenic charge, and lone scenic artist. Doing all of that as my first design for any musical was almost a bit much, but it turned out to be a wildly valuable learning experience.

(Photographs by Don LaBarre)

Initially, I was incredibly excited to make my musical theatre design debut with one of my favorite musicals, but it quickly proved itself to be some much more than just fun and games. The props and scenery demands are both extensive and wildly specific -- a crossbow, a seemingly working torture rack, a chair with a working impalement mechanism, a crypt, and the moon, just to name a few.

The story takes place in about ten different locations both inside and outside the Addams Family mansion. Creating those locations both on a small budget on a stage that's just over 500 square feet was an interesting challenge. I tackled this challenge by creating a four-sided turntable, which, with the incredible engineering expertise of technical director Benjamin Gaffney, not only rotated but also tracked up and down the stage toward the audience. The four sides of the turntable included the entryway to the Great Hall, Morticia's Boudoir, Pugsley's playroom and bedroom, and a fourth side that doubled as Gomez's grotto and the guest bedroom.

Additionally, I created a traveler drop with whimsical trees and the Addams gates. Three upstage flats individually rotated on a center point to indicate interior scenes with dark wood paneling and molding and a gallery of Addams portraits from throughout the ages and exterior scenes with an eerie purple sky and dark, twisted trees and graves. The graves on the front of the stage, along with the Addams Family tree growing straight up out of the middle of the audience, were meant to make the set take up the whole theater instead of just the stage area, as the blocking and choreography did, with the Beinekes running up and down the aisles as the Ancestors try to guide them through Central Park. Instead of having a full ornate crypt, the Ancestors entered from a trapdoor next to the stage on the audience right floor, implying that their graves are the ones represented on the front of the stage.

The base stage was four 4' square tombs, two at 6" and two at 1', at the director's request, to create some visual variety. These created some incredible levels for dancing, seating, and basically functioned as a sort of playground for the actors. One of my personal favorite features of these tombs was that our Wednesday, played by the tiny but talented Madison Deadman, standing on the highest platform could actually be eye to eye with the super tall Lucas Beineke, as portrayed by the incredible Caleb Richards. Another choice moment with the lower tomb was an irate Morticia, played by the lovely Erica Werner, physically lifting up Gomez, played by Kevin Stoffel, and setting him down on it before storming out of the scene.

(Photo graph by Patrice J. Nelms)

As far as the weirder props and set pieces go, I was most worried about creating a torture rack that was simple and safe and finding a decent chair to destroy and turn into a torture device. The torture rack turned out to be the easiest part -- a couple of bungee cords, some screws, some hole saw off-cuts, a couple pieces of trim chain, some selvage scraps and gaff tape created a simple mechanism that was comfortable for our young Pugsley, a local kid named Logan DenBleyker, easy to use, and absolutely safe.

While the chair stock at TBayT isn't incredibly large, I managed to find a leather upholstered chair that was looking a little worse for the wear and wouldn't suffer too much from getting torn up. I found a sharp, broken piece of 2x4 and shaped it with a belt sander into a long blade, coated it in metallic silver spray paint and gave it a light dusting of red for blood and rust texture, as this thing is supposed to be from the Spanish Inquisition. Our wonderful TD engineered the mechanism for the chair, which was a simple but wildly effective pull cord on the back. The chair was dressed with a red skirt around the bottom and textured to look old and distressed.

(Photograph by Patrice J. Nelms)

Unfortunately, a crossbow wasn't something that we found in our weapons stock, so we made one ourselves. I traced the pieces out on stick lumber scarps, Benjamin cut them out, and I assembled, sanded and painted them and strung it. The benefit of making it ourselves was that we measured it to fit Madison's armspan the way that it should, which it probably wouldn't have had we bought or borrowed one. We spent zero dollars, probably did a total of 40 minutes of work between the two of us, and had a really excellent, solid prop that fit this tiny actress perfectly.

My favorite props of the entire show were the bird puppets for the song "Pulled." The script calls for Wednesday to break the neck of a little bird, which she then throws into the air and says, "Fly away little birdie!" before continuing her song. I tried a couple different methods before I came up with a good one. First we had a prototype where the neck was a popsicle stick for her to break and them replace every night, but it was too hard to break in a way that would register with the audience. I entertained the idea of bendy straw necks for a few minutes before coming up with a better idea.

In the end, I made a base that was essentially a styrofoam cup with some foam padding and blue skin, and found a pattern online for fabric Christmas trees. I traced the cone pattern onto the blue fabric and instead of making it a cone, I gathered it in the back and sewed it shut. I hand stitched around the circumference of the beak and gathered it slightly to give the head and beak some more shape. I sewed snaps onto the heads and the bodies with bright red thread and left a good four inches of thread connecting the two, in the interest of the heads not getting lost. In the end, we wound up cutting the strings off at the request of the actress playing Wednesday because the obvious fakeness was taking her out of the scene, which is a totally valid issue to have. One of the heads did end up getting lost for a few hours, but it turned up no real problem. Both the director and the audience loved the cartoony headless birds, and they got plenty of laughs every night.

My favorite scenic elements were definitely the interior hallway portraits, all three of which I painted myself in the Addams style based on historic photos and portraits. All three of them took me about an hour and a half including dry time. References to them were built into the blocking and movement of "Secrets" in places where larger productions would have choreography referencing specific Ancestors.

All in all, Addams Family was challenging, but it gave me a lot of chances to experiment with what works for me as a designer and technician and I learned a ton from it.

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