Ghostly garb gets Penn Hills a Best Costume Design award for ‘Addams Family’
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Penn Hills High School’s 2019 musical has won a Gene Kelly award for Best Costume Design.
The honor was announced during the 29th annual Gene Kelly Awards ceremony in Downtown Pittsburgh on May 25, where the students performed an excerpt from “The Addams Family” in front of a crowd of roughly 3,000.
The awards are modeled after Broadway’s Tony Awards, and high school students are offered cash and university scholarships. There were 33 participating schools in this year’s competition.
Penn Hills High School was nominated to win in seven categories – a first for the school, said music director Kala Williams.
“It’s that kind of recognition that we really appreciated this year,” she said, adding the key to such a successful production was having such motivated students and a seasoned directing team.
Diane Tirio, the production’s costume director and retired high school home economics teacher, agreed.
“There’s really good chemistry between all of us,” she said, adding the directing team is made of a history teacher, an archaeologist, a nurse, a chemist, an accountant and other teachers.
She said the team began thinking about the show’s costume design in October, when they looked at photographs from the play’s run on Broadway.
Tirio said the biggest challenge was designing costumes for the ghost ancestors that had “dimension.”
“Otherwise, they would look like a bunch of bathrobes,” she said.
Some of the costumes included a 1950s wedding dress, a 1970s prom dress and a jacket with puffy shoulders from the 1980s.
“We get to be very creative … we really want to have a good product when we’re done and we look at (designing costumes) very critically,” Tirio said.
The high school production was nominated for best musical, best costume design, best lighting design, best supporting actor (Harrison Bash as Fester Addams), best ensemble, best execution of direction and best execution of music direction.