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Summer 2019Addams Family - Theatre Review

Those who know Heywood well will recognise one of our most famous families, The Addams. Recreated with loving care by the director, Jo Weetman, they enable her to use her day time skills as a midwife to breathe life into the loving, caring family first seen some time ago on television.

The family believe in retaining their formal links with their dead? ancestors which gives the director the chance to have at least 40 people from Heywood and Rochdale on the stage dancing and singing to the fabulous music of the ten members of the orchestra.

Who would have thought that so many talented people live and work in the town and that they would have been prepared to put in so much work for nothing except the chance to appear before a keen Heywood audience?

As Morticia, the luminous, loving vampire, Shelley Roberts attracts a dedicated audience. Not only does she look the part with ghostly relish, but she can sing, dance and act almost as well as her husband, the well-known Spanish vampire, Gomez de la Hoy (John Weetman), although his skills with a torture chair are nearly as good as his acting.

The other members of the family are all to be seen regularly in Heywood Market, either as children behaving badly, Pugsley (Holly Hughes) or elders, grandma (Andrea Leasby) selling her potions from a shopping cart to an unsuspecting Heywood public. I swear I have seen Fester (James Earnshaw) on the school run in his yellow jacket.

The plot is straight forward, boy meets girl (Sarah Howarth), falls in love with her goth like charms and her ability to bite him like nobody else. He and his family, a normal couple from Slaithwaite and Mossley, come to dinner where they get to play family games which involve rumours of various untoward practices.

Anybody who reads Rochdale Online or the Heywood Advertiser will recognise what happens next... Yes, a good old-fashioned family row, but, thanks to the director’s efforts everything ends well, or at least not everybody dies.

What a great advert for Heywood.

Director, Jo Weetman
Sponsored by Kavanagh & Coates
Review: Steve Griffiths

Forthcoming productions for Heywood Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society:
Bugsy Malone 15-19 October 2019

www.heywoodaods.co.uk