By Sandi Masori
SAN DIEGO- Tucked into an office park in Kearny Mesa is the not-new-to-San Diego, but newish-to-the-area San Diego Musical Theater. It relocated from downtown during the pandemic. It’s a small but charming theater that puts on some big, as the name suggests, musical productions. And, just in time for Halloween, that’s where The Addams Family is playing.
The basic premise of the show is that Wednesday Addams (Lena Ceja) has fallen in love with Lucas Beineke (Carson Inouye), a “normal” boy from Ohio and they want to introduce their parents to each other.
Of course introducing families never goes quite the way you hope and in spite of both kids warning their parents to “be normal,” hilarity and misunderstandings ensue.
The show opens with a high-energy full-cast song-and-dance number that sets the tone for the good time to come. It also showcased the large cast right from the getgo.
The sets were mostly dependent on the “walls” with very few props moving on and off the stage. It was opening night so I’m sure some things are still being worked out, but it did seem that some of the transitions between scenes took a beat or two too long for such a minimal set. The audience was left in darkness a couple of times and I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to have one of the ghostly “ancestors” dance across the stage during that moment to avoid the momentary pause.
The themes are all very relatable, like when Gomez (Mauricio Mendoza) sings about how Wednesday is growing up so fast. Perhaps all the parents in the audience felt a little tug at their heart.
Another fun song was “Full Disclosure” an after-dinner party game the Addams like to play, where each person takes a sip from a chalice and then tells a secret. And in the spirit of full disclosure, before I get too far into this review, I have to admit that I know Mendoza, the show lead, his wife Yeniffer is a friend of mine, and I’ve taken some of their acting workshops. I didn’t know he was in the play until I got there and started looking at the program. I have to admit that when I saw that my first thought was “oh wow! That’s so cool” and my second thought was “oh G-d, I hope he doesn’t suck, I don’t want to have to write a bad review.” Fear not reader, he was magnificent. And, since I was afraid of bias, I paid close attention to how the audience responded and they agreed with me.
His brother Carlos Mendoza is the show director, and Carlos’ husband Ryan Fahey plays Mal Beineke, Lucas’ dad. You might think that working together like that wouldn’t work out well, but like the Addams family, it just worked.
Debbie Nicastro as Grandma really killed it, no pun intended. Young AJ Gange more than held his own in the role of Pugsley; Alexis Zimmerman was compelling as Alice Beineke; and Ceja’s Wednesday entranced my son Shor, though he felt the writers wrote her a little too peppy.
Speaking of the writers, the Jewish writers Marshall Brickman, Rick Elice, and Andrew Lippa dropped in a nod to us when Gomez was telling the Beinekes how his family got from Spain to Florida, the home of, among other things, many old retired Jews. I will admit that initially upon hearing that line I started to wonder if it was a love note to the tribe from a Jewish writer, or a strange line from a goy. A couple of Google searches later I had my answer. I think these lines that keep popping up in shows is the Jewish equivalent of “the nod” that Black men give each other when they see each other in the crowd. A quick little “I see you.”
The Addams Family plays through Oct 29.
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Sandi Masori is a food and theater reviewer for San Diego Jewish World. When she’s not covering food or theater, she helps authors self-publish, hangs out with her kids, and searches for the best sushi in town.