ARTS & EVENTS

Plenty of Treats at the Playhouse

October tradition invites kids to help save Halloween

By Bridgette M. Redman

For 16 years, the Santa Monica Playhouse has invited the children of the community (and their families) to join them in saving Halloween from disappearing forever. “Absolutely Halloween” is an original musical created by the co-founders of the Playhouse, Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo, one in which Candy, a teenager who has decided she’s too old for Halloween, embarks on a journey where she must enter the Otherworld, solve riddles and decide whether she can save the holiday for Thisworld. After the Playhouse’s initial performance of the show, they were deluged with requests for an encore—until it became as much of a Halloween tradition for the Playhouse as candy and trick-or-treating is for children everywhere. It’s a collaboration between two artists with a long history of creating together. Since 1970, they’ve written hundreds of plays and musicals. They’ve developed a process where when one of them gets an idea— whether from a conversation, a dream or something they saw—and they start improvising and creating characters and story arcs together. That was how “Absolutely Halloween” was developed after being born on the Santa Monica Promenade. Rudie said they had done other Halloween shows, but they were mostly musical revues. They wanted to do a real Halloween play with a story. “I was walking down the Promenade and this melody came into my head,” Rudie said. “I just started humming it and singing it and I was afraid I was going to forget it, so I ran back to the Playhouse and played it on the piano and wrote it down really quickly. The last line for the chorus was ‘Always, absolutely Halloween.’” The story begins with the characters as unanimated Halloween costumes. They can only come to life as long as someone believes in them. In “Absolutely Halloween,” Candy is a young girl who decides she’s too old for dressing up. “One of the themes of the play is what she says right in the

PHOTO CREDIT: JAMES COOPER

Back row: Cattypuss (Meghan Nealon), The Witch (Cydne Moore) and Candy (Tiffany Haile); Front row: Hester the Jester (Michala Peltz), Patty Patches (Kendal Evans) and Fifika the Fortune Teller (Celeste Akiki).

beginning,” Rudie said. “I’m playing roles every day. I’m playing mother, daughter, sister, cheerleader, babysitter. Why should I do it on Halloween? I’m doing it too much as it is and it’s too much pressure on my life.’ Of course, by the end of the play, she realizes that she’s not playing roles, but we all have many different people inside of us…we are never too old to dream or to have an imagination.” DeCarlo observed that the themes of the play have resonated through the years, some coming out more deeply as different actors take on the roles and audiences with different experiences come to see it. One of those themes, he said, was the need for people to keep a healthy sense of themselves. “We need to embrace ourselves, not out of arrogance or conceit or self-centeredness, but as a tool to give us confidence, to give us clarity, to give us a direction, and a sense of accomplishment in our journey,” DeCarlo said. “It connects us to the value of family and family history.” One of the ways they have been able to measure the success of this show is in the pure delight that children express after seeing it. On opening weekend, DeCarlo said there was a young four-year-old girl who was crying in the beginning of the show because it got dark and it scared her. “She was the first one out of the theater and she just ran right up to the cat and gave her a big hug,” DeCarlo said. “It was just so beautiful to watch.” And it isn’t just the children who are affected. “There’s a moment in the play where Candy thinks that she has failed,” Rudie said. “The other characters tell her that it’s not about failure, it’s about the journey. It’s about her making up her mind that she’s going to save Halloween so there is always a chance and as a family, we all support each other. One of the fathers came up to me afterwards. He said, ‘You know when you did that monologue, you ruined me. You just ruined me.’” In addition to Candy, who is played by Tiffany Haile, other characters include The Witch (Cydne Moore), Cattypuss (Meghan Nealon), Patty Patches (Kendal Evans), Hester the Jester (Michala Peltz) and Fifika the Fortune Teller (Celeste Akiki). “Cattypuss is my favorite character—she’s a cat,” Rudie said. “She likes candy and she helps lead all of the magical spells we do.” Each spell—which the children in the audience get to help cast—is done in a different language. The languages include French, Spanish, German, Celtic, Romani and cat language. Patty Patches was a ragdoll. When Candy was a little girl, she wanted a costume that wasn’t like anyone else’s, the kind you couldn’t get at a CVS or neighborhood store. She and her mom designed Patty Patches and sewed her together. “In addition to being a costume that no one else has, it’s a memory that she can always cherish of doing something with her mom,” Rudie said. Hester the Jester is a jester costume and she is also a riddler. For Candy to complete her quest, she has to be able to answer the unanswerable riddle. Hester poses the riddles to Candy, but every time she answers one, it becomes wrong because, Rudie explains, if you can answer it, then it’s not unanswerable. Fifika is played by the one person in the cast who has been in every production of the musical. “Akiki has been playing the role for 16 years—we actually created it for her,” Rudie said. “She’s French and there are several French interchanges in the play between Cattypuss and Fifika.” The witch is the leader of the whole group who leads everyone on the journey and is the one who directly communicates with the audience who live on the opposite side of the “veil.” “The characters live on one side of the veil and the audience on the other, but for one night a year, on Halloween, the veil is lifted and then everybody gets to help save Halloween for one more year,” Rudie said. DeCarlo describes the musical as a wonderful family outing and experience for all ages. It’s important to the Playhouse, he explains, that they try to bridge the gap between child and adult. Events like “Absolutely Halloween” are a way of encouraging conversations between the generations. “One of the things that we have nurtured over the years is this conversation about experiences other than school,” DeCarlo said. “They’re talking about events in the world, in their community and in their imaginations and crossing that gap that sometimes forms. It seems to have a very positive effect on the community and the family. We really strive to establish an environment where that can happen easily without a lot of complications.”

WHAT: “Absolutely Halloween”

WHERE: Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th Street, Santa Monica WHEN: Oct 29 at 2 p.m., Oct. 30 at 12:30 p.m. TICKETS: $15 adults, $12.50 for kids 12 and under

INFO:

santamonicaplayhouse.com