Bede’s, you chose boldly – and you triumphed!

Thinking of a school for your son or daughter? One with proper family values? Beware: there is one school out there which will transport them to a bizarre unworldly place which turns normality upside-down. Surely not those nice people at Bede’s School…?

Rest easy, gentle parents: it’s only the Bede’s Performing Arts Faculty, revelling deliciously in an extravagantly Gothic production of The Addams Family. The school which never does drama by halves has once again triumphed, filling the Devonshire Park Theatre last week with a dazzling feast of acting, music and dance.

Bede’s impressive portfolio from previous years includes a very accomplished Oliver and a quite outstanding production of Sondheim’s Into The Woods. The bold policy of staging school shows in a professional theatre says much about Bede’s aspirations, but these young performers have once again risen splendidly to the challenge.

The choice of show? One might briefly raise an eyebrow, for the cult tongue-in-cheek musical has limited scope for proper character acting, and it’s short on really memorable musical numbers. But what it does demand – from creatives as well as its youthful cast – is imagination, focused energy, attention to detail. And this Bede’s company scores sky-high on all those counts.

Truthfully, too, The Addams Family is pretty light on social comment or the human condition, but it is mischievous fun. It is life, but life reflected in a distorting mirror, light and dark juxtaposed.

This Bede’s production captures exactly – and just as faithfully as any professional production – the tongue-in-cheek humour and the exuberant, extravagant style of the score and the script. A gleeful and energetic young cast is guided by Karen Lewis’s inventive direction, and the hours and weeks of rehearsal have brought rich dividend: these performers, frankly, have attained a level so assured and accomplished that the school’s drama staff may well have been sitting relaxed in the stalls, instead of sweating backstage over last-minute adjustments. Well, that’s the theory anyway…

Nothing in the musical theatre spectrum quite compares with The Addams Family. It is not Rocky Horror anarchy. It occasionally glowers like the darker moments of Sondheim, but without the gravitas. Wickedly brilliant lyrics and bold music actually create a kind of parody of musical theatre, as if we are looking down a hall of distorting mirrors. And it seduces us into seeing the abnormal as normal.

The school draws full value from its prestigious hiring, with admirable attention to the details and peripherals. Immaculately costumed pre-performance characters greet us – with their cute puppets – in the foyer on arrival, and the programme is attractive and nicely detailed.

A blood-red and midnight-black set glowers at us from the start. Soon, a ghostly-white chorus will emerge from somewhere on the Other Side. All the technicals are tuned to perfection, well beyond the expectations for a standard school production. It’s all fabulously ghoulish and, of course, one great big send-up, with nothing actually horrific.

Will Quibell’s Fester has the right mix of creepy and cuddly, and Anthony Tridico’s Lurch the Butler is stonily comic. The humour is only slightly tasteless and achingly funny.

The excellent Will Gillett bustles and blusters as Gomez, while his wife Morticia (Antonia Clark) assuredly maintains a fiendish control of the family dynamics. Liv Driver is a riot as the Grandma with some gruesome habits.

In the best spirit of a school show, some parts are double-cast – including Anna Scott and Maya Goswami as Pugsley, and Veronica Travers and Tabby Newton as daughter Wednesday. It did mean (this gets confusing) that this reviewer saw Tabby’s Wednesday on the Friday night. And she frankly stole the show: a characterisation as sharp as a knife, the stare of a Greta Thunberg and a voice with both power and control.

But the unearthly Addams Family and the real world are about to collide. Wednesday – every parent’s teen nightmare – wants to marry out, with her young beau Lucas Beineke – an engaging, assured performance from Alfie Kennedy. And his family are nicely normal: Robbie Cloke the hapless Dad and Trinity Gott the Mum who lives her twee little life in rhyming couplets.

The Act One finale is as good as any piece of theatre you will see this year – anywhere – as the characters, one by one, sip from the truth-drug chalice, and make their bizarre and hilarious “Full Disclosures”. In the process, Trinity’s Alice Beineke throws off every inhibition and delivers a show-stopping aria to hedonism: it’s a glorious piece of musical theatre and the high point of this accomplished Bede’s production.

The ensemble is truly an ensemble - tight, disciplined energy and forceful expressive singing that makes the most of some delicious lyrics. The brilliant choreography takes the big numbers into a new dimension: not just your standard song-and-dance routines, but a whole underworld moving in ghostly rhythm.

Under Sherrie Pennington, all the movement has definition, sinewy athleticism and terrific detail. The chorus of the Ancestors is just mesmerizing: a dozen performers sometimes making a dozen different movements, and yet superbly synchronized. MD Rob Scarmadella briskly directs his note-perfect band through the boisterous orchestral score.

Perversely of course, in a show where just about every expectation is inverted, the Ancestors are actually younger than the Family. And like the whole company, they are divinely dressed – shimmering white against the Family’s prevailing black.

If the show – as written – has a weakness, the first half slightly outshines the second, and the writing does dip slightly just after half-time. It needs another big ensemble number, but for that we have to wait for the absolutely stunning finale. Bede’s, you chose boldly – and you triumphed!

Kevin Anderson