Will Tye celebrates as he competes for Stony Brook University. File photo from SBU
Will Tye competes for Stony Brook University. File photo from SBU
Former Stony Brook University tight end Will Tye made history on Sunday when he became the first former Seawolves player to appear in a game in the National Football League. Tye was signed to the New York Giants’ active roster off the franchise’s practice squad on Saturday.
The tight end made his debut in the first quarter and was in on multiple plays, including being the target of Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning on a passing play in the second quarter. In the game, he caught the ball three times for 40 yards.
The Middletown, Conn., native played for Florida State University before transferring to Stony Brook. He played in 23 games for the Seawolves and pulled down 79 catches for 1,015 yards and nine touchdowns in his two seasons. He also returned 30 punts for 166 yards.
Some Suffolk County elected officials are calling the red light safety program a scam. File photo
Five years after red light cameras were installed in Suffolk County, North Shore officials are still examining the program’s effectiveness, as well as its purpose, by asking: Are the cameras a means of enhancing public safety or simply another source of income for the county?
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, Republican Suffolk County Legislators Tom Muratore (Ronkonkoma); Robert Trotta (Fort Salonga); Leslie Kennedy (Nesconset); Tom Cilmi (Bay Shore); Tom Barraga (West Islip) and Kevin McCaffrey (R-Lindenhurst) addressed some of their concerns when they met to discuss potential reforms to the Red Light Safety Program.
The program was written into law in 2009 and installed red light cameras at up to 50 intersections in Suffolk County. The cameras were installed to capture the backs of the drivers’ cars, as opposed to the drivers themselves. Under the program, drivers who run through a red light face a $50 traffic violation but do not receive points against their license.
Prior to the press conference, Muratore said county Republicans were left in the dark regarding details surrounding the program, such as the duration of various lights. While there are three-second and five-second yellow and red lights, Muratore said it was impossible to identify which lights resided where.
Despite this, Muratore said he found the program relatively reasonable. The legislator said he voted in favor of the program, thinking this new technology would help avoid traffic accidents. But what he disagreed with, he said, was the county’s manipulating of administrative fees associated with the program.
“If you’re getting tens of thousands of tickets and you increase the fee by $5.00, you’re getting half a million to a million dollars, maybe more,” Muratore said in an interview. “That’s just money-grabbing right there.”
Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (D) did not respond to requests seeking comment.
After Tuesday’s press conference in Riverhead, Trotta said he thinks the “money-grabbing” surpassed Bellone’s proposal to increase the administrative fee. He said the county has $2 billion worth of debt and claimed the program is nothing but an opportunity to collect money to help offset that.
According to Trotta, if the camera “does not produce 25 tickets in a 16-hour period, then the county has to pay $2,136.”
The money is a fixed monthly fee the county must pay the program’s contractor, Baltimore-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. According to an amendment to the program, the county must also pay an additional $17.25 for each paid citation generated from such enforcement system.
While public safety is a concern for many county officials, Trotta said he does not think there is a safety issue. Some Suffolk County residents also oppose the cameras, so much so that Stephen Ruth of Centereach used a pole to turn the cameras away from the road at various locations. He was arrested in August for tampering, and some hailed him as a “Red Light Robin Hood.” The defendant called the program “abusive.”
Muratore said the issue is not really people running red lights, but drivers’ timing when turning right on red. He said drivers should not receive a ticket for turning right on red when it is permitted, provided they came to a full stop: “They forget they have to stop and then go. There’s no three second rule or five second rule, it’s a full stop.”
Justice Peter Graham has served Port Jefferson for more than 30 years. Photo by Talia Amorosano
After more than 30 years, Justice Peter Graham left his mark on Port Jefferson.
The village judge, who died on Tuesday afternoon, will be remembered for his personality and for his service to the court — but his path to that position was a little out of order.
Born on July 4, 1930, to Pedro and Helen Graham, the Brooklyn-born Peter Graham didn’t always know he would study law. He entered seminary at age 14 and stayed for four years before he realized that it wasn’t for him. Known for his sense of humor, the justice freely described his decision as being guided by his aversion to “the two Cs”: chastity and celibacy.
He hung up his cassock and went to college, studying biology and chemistry before heading to law school.
In an interview in July, Graham said he took a detour before reaching the courtroom, serving in the U.S. Army.
“When I finished law school, I felt that I owed my country two years of my life,” Graham said.
It was in the service that he got his first hands-on law experience, as he was appointed the district attorney of his battalion and was tasked with prosecuting murder, assault and rape cases.
Graham rose from those humble beginnings to eventually become a village justice in 1983. He was most recently re-elected in June.
“All I do is try to be fair to the people,” he said earlier this year. He described his experience living in Port Jefferson and serving as a village justice as “a pleasure.”
Mayor Margot Garant, who knew Graham since she was a child, called him a “dear friend.”
“It’d be really fair to say that [he] was just an integral part of everyone’s life here in the village,” she said.
The mayor referred to the justice’s personality as “friendly, personable, jovial.”
“He will be absolutely irreplaceable,” Garant said. “There’s not going to be one person … that will ever be able to step into his shoes.”
Graham had the respect of both residents and the people who worked with him.
“He’s awesome. I’ve actually worked for eight judges and he is one of my top,” Village Court Clerk Christine Wood said in an interview in July. “He’s the most caring gentleman, and I don’t say that about many people. He’s got a heart of gold.”
Graham is survived by his loving Mary Ellen Mulligan; children Kim (Jim) Sloane and Patrick Mulligan; beloved grandchildren Jimmy, Patrick, Sean and Shannon; dear sister Maureen and brother Robert (Millie) Graham; along with Phyllis Graham and children Peter, Paul, Mary Jane and Christopher, and Mary Jane’s daughter Nina. He is also survived by other grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
“He was a magnificent grandfather,” Mulligan said on Wednesday. “You couldn’t have a better human being, a better man.”
A memorial celebration will be held at the Bryant Funeral Home in East Setauket on Friday, from 6 to 10 p.m. A funeral Mass will take place the next morning, at Infant Jesus R.C. Church in Port Jefferson at 9 a.m.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Stony Brook Cancer Center and to the loving nurses and aides of 19 North.
One of the tables at last year’s event beautifully decorated for the fall. Photo from PJCC
The annual A Taste of Port Jefferson is back and is better than ever. Now in its 8th year, the one-day event will feature food samplings and wine and beer tastings from more than 35 local shops and restaurants.
There are only two requirements — come with an empty stomach and be prepared to feel full from the delicious foods!
Presented by The Greater Port Jefferson Chamber of Commerce, the event, for ages 21 and over, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 24, from noon to 4 p.m. at the Port Jefferson Village Center at 101A E. Broadway overlooking beautiful Port Jefferson Harbor.
As in previous years, guests are invited to be judges and vote on Best Food and Drink. “Keeping the event fresh, we also have a new contest this year — voting for favorite dessert. We also have many new vendors, which is very exciting,” said Barbara Ransome, director of operations at the chamber.
Participating businesses will include C’est Cheese, The Village Way, Tommy’s Place, The Fifth Season, The Arden, Ruvo, The Amazing Olive, The Pie Pizzeria Napoletana, Penntara Lao-Thai Catering, Smoke Shack Blues BBQ, Uncle Giuseppe’s, Z-Pita, Messina Market & Catering, Cornecopia Cafe, Pasta Pasta, Costco, Custom Cafe & Deli, Danfords Wave Seafood Kitchen, La Parilla, Port Jeff Lobster House, Schafer’s andSmoke Shack Blues BBQ.
Dessert samplings from A Cake in Time, Chocology Unlimited, La Bonne Boulangerie and Starbucks will also be available. Wine and beer tastings will be offered by Mora’s Fine Wines, the Port Jeff Brewing Co., Vine 2 Vine, Brewology295 and the L.I. Pour House.
Sponsors this year include Long Island Creative Contracting, UnitySEO Solutions, Yelp, Times Beacon Record Newspapers, Arras Agency, Jolie Powell Realty, AXA Advisors, St. Charles Hospital, Live It Up!, Smoke Shack Blues and Port Jefferson Live.
Tickets are $40 in advance, $50 at the door. For further information, call 631-473-1414 or visit www.ATasteofPortJefferson.com.
Gábor Balázsi with his daughter Julianna. Photo from Balázsi
The battle is like a game of chess, with each side making moves and countermoves to gain the upper hand. The difference between this contest and a game two players can walk away from is that the stakes are considerably higher, often marking the difference between life and death.
Predicting the responses of enemies like drug-resistant infections and cancers are critical to winning the high stakes battle.
Gábor Balázsi, a Henry Laufer associate professor of physical and quantitative biology at Stony Brook University, has created a synthetic biological model to understand how systems react to stresses such as antibiotic treatments, or, to extend the metaphor, different moves on the chess board.
Gábor Balázsi with his daughter Julianna. Photo from Balázsi
He inserted genetic codes into yeast. Some start-up companies have tried to employ these techniques to increase the efficiency of the production of energy or medications.
Companies “engineer bacteria to do something good, but will they be stable? Will they stay the way you engineered them? It’s important to know how long it’ll last, when it’ll break and when you should start a new culture,” Balázsi said.
Indeed, Balázsi used computer simulations and mathematical models to predict the evolutionary fate of these synthetic gene circuits and then tested these predictions through experiments.
In these experiments, Balázsi introduced drugs that would test the yeast’s ability to tap into the inserted genes and make the kind of changes necessary to survive. In some of the experiments, he introduced another chemical that could turn on the synthetic genes. He published this work recently in the scientific journal, Molecular Systems Biology.
In one of the experiments, Balázsi did not enable the yeast to activate the drug resistance gene, and yet, the yeast figured out how to use that gene on its own. These mutations happened in the synthetic gene circuit and in the yeast genome. The mutations gave the yeast the ability to turn on its inserted genetic code.
“The yeast figures out how to start activating those genes without us enabling it to do so,” he said.
This is akin to putting a trombone next to a saxophone player, without teaching the sax player how to make music on the brass instrument. Without any need to play the trombone, the musician might stick with the instrument familiar to her. With enough motivation, such as playing in a high-paying wedding, the sax player is likely to retrain herself on the new instrument. Balázsi is seeking to understand how yeast make similar kinds of genetic changes to survive during drug treatment.
A physicist by training, Balázsi feels driven by the desire to make models that can make predictions. He hopes these kinds of experiments can find an application in the ongoing battle with drug resistance and diseases.
“His physics background provides him with a larger scale systems view of what’s happening,” said James Collins, a professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He’s one of the pioneers at introducing network approaches into biology.”
Collins and Balázsi worked together when Balázsi was a postdoctoral researcher. The two researchers recently discussed beginning a collaboration using network biology on tuberculosis.
Working with yeast makes it possible to make the kinds of evolutionary predictions and conduct experiments that would be considerably more difficult with animals. With yeast, he can observe as many as 80 generations within 10 days because yeast divide eight to 10 times in the lab. Observing genetic changes in response to environmental conditions over a few weeks with yeast would be like traveling through centuries with animals or millennia with humans.
Last year, Balázsi completed a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health through the Director’s Program.
While Balázsi is continuing to work with yeast cells, he is now also pursuing research on cancer. He has been working to introduce multiple synthetic gene circuits into cancer, similar to what he did with yeast, aiming to control cancer cells and understand their biology.
A native of Transylvania, a region that is now part of Romania, Balázsi grew up speaking Hungarian and studied Romanian in school. He came to the United States in 1997. He and his wife Erika live in East Setauket with their daughter Julianna. The Balázsi family moved to Long Island last summer.
Balázsi enjoys traveling to New York City and New Jersey, where he and his wife enjoy taking part in traditional Hungarian folk dancing.
The kind of experiments Balázsi has done and would like to continue to do may one day give scientists the ability to anticipate how a cancer or drug-resistant strain of a disease might react to a new treatment.
“If we are clever enough and we design a gene circuit that lures the cells into an evolutionary trap, where they evolve in a certain way that later on becomes disadvantageous, we could possibly help cure” these diseases, he said. This kind of approach and solution, however, is “far away” from the basic knowledge researchers now have because scientists don’t yet understand enough about the evolution of cancer cell populations in humans.
A view of a healing garden at Mather Hospital’s new pavilion. Photo from the hospital
New facilities at John T. Mather Memorial Hospital aim to reduce infection rates and bring more doctors to the area.
The Port Jefferson hospital recently dedicated its new Arthur & Linda Calace Foundation Pavilion, adding more than 28,400 square feet of space to the north side of the hospital that is being used to house patient rooms as well as medical offices and conference rooms.
According to Mather spokesman Stuart Vincent, there are 35 one-bed rooms in the new pavilion. Rather than using the space to add to the hospital’s 248 beds, beds were moved from existing double rooms into the new pavilion, creating 70 new single-bed patient rooms throughout the hospital.
A view of a patient bedroom at Mather Hospital. Photo from the hospital
Taking away those 35 double rooms and adding the 70 single rooms means “for the first time, the majority of rooms at Mather are now single-bedded, which aids in both patient healing and in reducing the risk of infection spreading among patients,” Vincent said in an email.
The patient rooms in the new pavilion will be used for intermediate care and will each have their own medication cabinet and a computer for managing patient information, according to Vincent. The unit also keeps nurses close to patients, with nursing stations throughout the floor.
Joseph Wisnoski, CFO at Mather, said in a previous statement, “A single-bed patient room is no longer a luxury, but the standard for hospitals across the nation.”
That patient unit is located above two floors of new offices and conference rooms and a 180-seat conference center. When the hospital broke ground on the expansion project two years ago, officials said the office space would be used to combat a shortage of primary care physicians by training more of those professionals — who would then hopefully stay in the area — in a graduate education program that includes seminars and symposia.
The pavilion is Mather’s first expansion in more than a decade, and Vincent said it is the sixth expansion since the hospital opened in 1929. It was named for Arthur and Linda Calace, the primary donors on the project, who raised their family nearby and wanted to give back to the community. The Calaces and other donors combined to cover $5 million of the total construction cost.
There were highlights in each city we visited in China, and I would like to share those with you in this last installment of my trip tagging along on my son’s speaking itinerary. We flew 16 hours to Shanghai, the gateway to that huge country. Someone likened Shanghai to New York and Beijing to Washington, D.C., because the Chinese federal government is in the latter city while the former is thought of as more of a cultural and fun place.
Shanghai is dazzling for its skyscrapers, night-lights akin to Times Square and history, particularly as displayed by its impressive 19th-century architecture along the Bund on the riverfront. The western powers, that forced China open then, built their customs houses and administrative headquarters there, and now those buildings are icons of success because Chinese in corporations and government offices people them. They look out across the Huangpu River on the newest and most luxurious section of the city, Pudong, which was originally swamps and slums but now houses the Shanghai World Financial Center in futuristic high-risers and the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV Tower.
My favorite place in the city is the Shanghai Museum, with its four floors displaying cultural relics and artifacts from more than 5,000 years ago. The architecture of the building itself symbolizes “a round heaven and a square earth.” Most impressive are the bronze items, largely for cooking and wine, that speak to the sophistication of these people thousands of years ago. Inside the museum is a large atrium from which the floors above are visible The collections may represent antiquity but the escalators efficiently carrying visitors from floor to floor convey modernity. And typical of Chinese zeal for business, there is a small gift shop on every floor in addition to the main one at the entrance. Calligraphy, pottery, jade, sculptures and bronze reproductions offer the visitor take-home reproductions of the treasures exhibited in the museum.
Shanghai is also known for a humanitarian action taken between 1933-41. At that time the city welcomed 30,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. Despite orders from the Nazi leaders demanding the refugees be turned over by Japan, their allies who then occupied China, the Jews were not. But Mao expelled all Westerners after his victory in 1949.
Suzhou, a half-hour bullet train ride from Shanghai, is famous for its canals and gardens. An outstanding example we enjoyed was the Humble Administrator’s Garden, a 16th-century gem with small ponds, bridges and secluded pavilions.
Hangzhou, another short train ride from Shanghai in the other direction, was termed by Marco Polo, “the City of Heaven,” and surrounds beautiful West Lake. Every evening on the lake is a sight to behold. Called “Impression West Lake,” it is a water, light and animation show created by Zhang Yimou, who co-directed the 2008 Summer Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. The entire production appears to take place improbably atop the water.
Nanjing, a walled city on the banks of the Yangzi River and in front of Purple Mountain, was next, one-and-a-half hours farther by train. Often the capital of the country through the centuries and the site of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, the city is also known for the brutality perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in 1937. Up to 400,000 people are thought to have been killed during that time which is still angry subject matter between the two countries. However, that doesn’t prevent China today from using police cars made by Honda.
We then flew a couple of hours northeast to Changchun, which is well off the tourism path. Once the capital of the Japanese–controlled state of Manchukuo, known to those who have seen the 1987 movie, “The Last Emperor,” the city is the center of car production. From here we were driven six hours, over every type of roadway from wide new highway to bumpy and twisting dirt surfaces and through thousands of acres of undeveloped forests, to a spectacular volcanic mountain jutting up against the border with North Korea. Changbaishan has a crater lake in its midst at better than 8,000 feet and is reached via a roller-coaster drive. The circumference of the mountaintop is an easy 9 miles hike, but we were severely warned not to do so lest the neighboring border guards arrest us.
Last stop was Beijing, another airplane ride southwest. There we managed to walk through the three tourist musts: the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. These have been dramatically commercialized since my last visit 10 years earlier, but they still are worthy, as is this most ancient and modern country, of everyone’s bucket list.
San Francisco lures tourists from all over the country and world. It’s a magnificent city, with the crooked Lombard Street, sea lions barking and bathing at Pier 39, the trollies riding up and down the hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, Ghirardelli Square and, for me, friends and family who have moved there.
And then there’s Alcatraz. There’s something about that famous prison where Al Capone, among many others, spent difficult years of their lives, that draws people to this famous prison. Like Liberty Island and Ellis Island, Alcatraz Island has a spectacular view of its nearby city.
It also offers numerous stories about the prisoner and their routines. I’ve been to the island three times, the last one with my wife and children. One of the details that stuck with me over the years was a testimonial by a prisoner who said the December holidays were always the most difficult time of the year, not only because the inmates missed their families, but also because they could hear the voices carried over the water of women and children singing Christmas carols.
The prison also recounts some of the noteworthy escape attempts. The Battle of Alcatraz, which occurred in 1946, was a bloody two-day siege in which prisoners and guards died.
The most famous escape, however, was the 1962 flight by brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris, which was recreated in the 1979 movie, “Escape from Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood. The trio, who were convicted of bank robberies, made fake heads, complete with their own hair, that they left in their beds, giving them time to head to a raft constructed out of raincoats.
The official version of the events of that night suggests that the three drowned in the bay. I’ve never been convinced of that perhaps because I was influenced by the Eastwood movie and also because it seemed like an unlikely ending for three men who had so meticulously planned their escape.
This past Monday, the History Channel shared a photo from relatives who said it showed the two brothers in Brazil in 1975. The show suggests that it could be these men, who would be in their 80s today. The investigation is reportedly considered open until the escapees reach 100 years old.
Is it them? Is this another step toward solving a mystery that’s 20 years older than the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa?
There’s a part of me that would like to think it’s them and that, after that incredible planning, they started their lives again in another country, hopefully without causing harm to anyone else while keeping a low profile for all these years.
This is not the same as murderers David Sweat and Richard Matt, whose recent escape from an upstate New York prison terrified the nearby areas because they might threaten or hurt people.
Armed robbers can and should be punished, even if they are clever enough to have managed to escape from one of the most famous prisons in the world.
Their escape, however, raises compelling questions about the routes people take in their lives. If these three men were that clever, that tolerant of high risk and that prepared to outmaneuver even the most escape-proof prison, imagine what they could have done with their lives if they had decided to contribute to society?
They didn’t discover a new technology, cure cancer or make the country safer from a possible terrorist attack. What they did, however, was remarkable and dramatic, with enormous high stakes. They may have defied the odds, survived and lived for decades in Brazil. It connects the dots on a story that had blank pages filled with mystery for all these years.
Dr. Frederick Schiavone with emergency medicine residents in the Clinical Simulation Center. Photo from Melissa Weir
Stony Brook is sending some fresh faces to one of its neighboring hospitals.
Earlier this month, Stony Brook University Hospital heralded in a new partnership with John T. Mather Hospital that will transition the Port Jefferson facility from a community hospital into an academic teaching hub. But that doesn’t mean Mather will be losing its community-centric feel, hospital officials said.
The partnership began in 2012 when Mather officials started seeking advice from Stony Brook Medicine on how to establish a new graduate medical education program, and quickly evolved into Stony Brook Medicine’s sponsorship of the program. Mather welcomed its first class of 19 residents studying internal medicine in July 2014 and it has been all-systems-go ever since. And if all goes well, Mather said it aspired to reach 100 residents at the end of five years.
“It’s an investment in the future,” said Dr. Joan Faro, chief medical officer at Mather, who works as the site’s designated institutional officer for the graduate medical education team and initially reached out to Stony Brook Medicine to explore the partnership. “Our standards will be as high, or even higher, as they have been as they are passed down, and we are so fortunate to take advantage of [Stony Brook Medicine’s] expertise and guidance.”
Under the new system, Stony Brook’s graduate medical education program reviews Mather’s selections for residency program directors and then Faro sends recommended candidates back to Stony Brook. The candidates are then interviewed and authorized for appointments. When Mather residents graduate, they will receive a Stony Brook University Hospital crest alongside the Mather crest on their graduation certificates.
With Stony Brook Medicine’s help, Mather has instituted its own de facto recruiting system for promising prospects in the medical arena. By inviting residents into Mather, the hospital is not only ingraining its culture into the learners at an early stage, but it is also setting them on a path that could potentially lead to long stays working there, Faro said. And with the recent opening of a new 35-bed facility on the Mather campus, the time could not be better for residents to be learning on-site.
Dr. Frederick Schiavone, vice dean of the graduate medical education program at Stony Brook Medicine, teamed up with Carrie Eckart, executive director of the same program, to help transition Mather into an academic teaching hospital over the past year and said it could not be going more smoothly, as Mather’s staff steps up to new teaching roles.
“It’s a passion,” Schiavone said. “People like to teach, love to teach. It’s built into what being a doctor means. When residents thank us for helping teach them, you couldn’t ask for a better reward.”
One of the benefits of becoming a teaching hospital for Mather, Faro said, is that the staff are required to stay on top of the latest developments in medical education and training, which means that Mather’s patients receive advanced methods of health care delivery. Schiavone said the affiliation was ideal for Stony Brook Medicine as it allows staffers to train residents from the beginning as they are brought up throughout the system.
“We need to reach out to our community,” Schiavone said. “The focus is always to deliver the best health care in Suffolk County. Mather’s success is our success.”
And by putting collaborative patient care at the center of the model of delivering health care, Schiavone said Stony Brook Medicine was benefitting from having more residency spots to dole out.
Having residents under the same roof as Mather’s experienced medical professionals would only raise the level of care the community hospital provides by reinforcing the facility’s standards, Faro said.
Editor’s note: This version of the story was updated to correctly reflect the number of residents Mather has taken in as its inaugural class.
The cast of ‘The Addams Family,’ from left, Terry Brennan, Daniel Belyansky, Jon Rivera, Steven Cottonaro, Gina Morgigno, Denise Antonelle and Marc Slomowitz. Photo by Timothy Pappalardo
By Charles J. Morgan
Deep, dark, dank and dusty were the living quarters of the cartoon-famous Addams Family immortalized by Charles Addams and carried forward by the long-running TV series. Just in time for Halloween, Oakdale’s CM Performing Arts Center’s Noel S. Ruiz Theatre has produced it in all its necropolitic splendor and funereal solemnity. And by the way … it’s a musical.
Given CMPAC’s penchant for grand and opulent staging, it was phenomenally successful. The ubiquitous and talented Patrick Grossman designed the set with its precise and swift and sure mobility. With keenly executed lighting plot by Carl Tese, the show’s dark and dreary set was suffused with appropriate ominous light including graveyard mist.
Grossman also directed and his skills with blocking and interpretation were palpably patent. CMPAC’s massive venue poses a problem for the making and breaking of character compositions in a coherent, logical (real?) manner. Theatrically, Grossman succeeded mightily in this. When it came to interpretation he did a credible job inculcating “spookiness.”
Jon Rivera, in the role of Gomez, has the dominant role. His voice, somewhere between a tenor robusto and dramatico, carried him emotionally through all his numbers such as “Wednesday’s Growing Up” and “Gomez’s What If” in Act I. He focuses emotion and sturdiness with masterful acumen.
Denise Antonelle, as his wife Morticia, has a firm soprano coupled with a voluptuous stage presence and a projection ability commingled with exceptional clarity. Their daughter Wednesday was played by Gina Morgigno. Morgigno was ingénue-like in her movements and that plangent voice in Act I’s “Pulled” and “Crazier Than You” in Act II ranked her as a first rate actress-singer. Fifth-grader Daniel Belyansky, who plays Pugsley, is wonderful in his solo number in Act I, a take-off on Gomez’s number “What If.” He has a strong developing voice, and this showcase number may mark him for much to come.
With a massive blonde wig, Terry Brennan plays Grandma, launching her scratchy, boisterious voice in earthy aphorisms, brooking no opposition from anyone. Marc Slomowitz as Uncle Fester had a sort of a parallel role. He had mobility, especially facial, and was hilarious in “Fester’s Manifesto” in Act I and “The Moon and Me” in Act II.
Then there was Lurch the butler. It was a silent role except for his gurgling and growling, the timing of which evoked some loud laughter, especially from your scribe. Steve Cottonaro handled this role with mimetic menace.
As usual, Matthew W. Surico led a live pit band with his expected genius. There was somewhat of a preponderance of Latin rhythms ranging from tango to 6/8 time Bossa Nova, even a waltz. The musical talents of this 12-piece outfit rose to resplendent heights. Choreography was in the hands of the skilled M.E. Junge who also played a small part as one of the Ancestors while costumes were neatly handled by Ronald Green III.
If the audience’s whooping and howling are any indication of the success of this production, it must be a smash hit. Your scribe more tacitly agrees.
The CM Performing Arts Center, 931 Montauk Highway, Oakdale will present “The Addams Family” through Nov. 8. Tickets range from $20 to $29. For more information, call 631-218-2810 or visit www.cmpac.com.
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