Participants in Stage Right’s second summer camp session hit the ground running, starting to rehearse for performances on their first day.

They’ll show what they learned during two musical productions Friday through Sunday in the Science Hall Theater on the Westmoreland County Community College Youngwood campus.

“We had a great camp with tons of kids,” who took classes in classes in acting, jazz and modern dance, voice and stage combat, said Artistic Director Tony Marino.

The 43-member teen group will stage “The Addams Family,” while the 50 preteens will present the audience-favorite classic, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Stage Right’s “Addams Family” melds aspects of Charles Addams’ original cartoon strip, which debuted in The New Yorker in 1938; the classic 1960s television show, and the Broadway musical version, Marino said.

”The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd, wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening,” Marino said.

Courtesy of Stage Right Cast members in Stage Right’s summer camp production of “The Addams Family” are Connor Parente (left), Emily Vohs, Michael Harris, Hannah Duckett, Alexa Cikowski, Laura Stanish, Ben Federico, Gloria Rosato, Nathan Dudash and (lying down) Braden Poole.  

The musical version “is funny for two reasons,” Marino said. “It retains the dark humor straight from the comic strip, and it has the humor added for Nathan Lane,” who played family patriarch Gomez Addams in the original Broadway cast.

“It has a lot of funny Nathan Lane asides,” Marino said. “Many of the rehearsals are stopping with out-and-out laughter, as a kid says something and they realize how funny it is, and then the whole cast is laughing.

“It’s written in that old-timey, classical musical theater way,” he said. “It has that vaudevillian sense of humor.”

As part of their preparations, the preteens had a watch party for the movie version of “Oz,” Marino said.

“They love it and they’re really enjoying it,” he said. “It’s amazing how (the story) still has such a great impact on kids today.”

The show will feature the familiar storyline of Dorothy landing in Oz via a tornado, only to discover “there’s no place like home,” along with all the beloved characters she meets along the way.

“We do a lot of high-definition projections, and it’s truly a circus,” Marino said.

Each show will have a different cast for each performance. Two dogs will act the part of Toto in “Oz,” Marino noted.

“The Wizard of Oz” will be performed at 6:30 p.m. Friday and 2 and 6:30 p.m. Saturday. “The Addams Family” will be performed at 8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets for each performance are $20, or $12 for students. To reserve, call 724-832-7464 or visit stagerightgreensburg.com.

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