Yes, they're creepy, mysterious, and altogether ooky, but they’re also delightful in the context of musical comedy. “The Addams Family” brought classic characters to life with an imaginative cast and musical prowess, with a tale that’s a gleeful spin on the typically strictly ghoulish crew.

This week is special for The Eye. For issue six, The Eye partnered with the Arts & Entertainment section and the Illustrations team to create the Arts Issue, where we take a moment to reflect on and celebrate the art scene on campus. This week is a milestone for us. Not only is it our first themed Eye issue of the semester, but it’s a cross-departmental project in a scope and scale that hasn’t been seen in recent time at the magazine.

In theater, the spotlight is focused on the actors onstage, their tangible performances principally resonant. But there is more to a production than the final product and more to the final product itself than what’s immediately visible. Recently, the Columbia University Players presented their production of “The Great Gatsby,” a play adaptation by Simon Levy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel. To better understand the complexity of the entire performance, we moved the spotlight behind the scenes to understand some of the unseen individuals that realize a theatrical production.

Elise Cowen, a Beat poet you have possibly never heard of, writhes on the floor, bathed in red light, hair tangled tightly in her fingers, agonized. Through the lens of student playwright Eden Arielle Gordon, BC ’19, this is the effect of the American Dream on a woman. Her new musical, “The Other Side,” aptly brings focus to forgotten female Beat poets—a necessary and important storyline to highlight—yet fails in providing a tonally cohesive and in-depth narrative.

Peet’s Coffee opened for business in the lobby on the ground floor of the Milstein Center on Tuesday in conjunction with the opening of the new building on Barnard’s campus.

In the 50th anniversary year of the 1968 Columbia protests, the Morningside campus has been ablaze with commotion, with the GWC-UAW graduate workers strike, the Barnard SGA referendum on divestment, and white supremacist Mike Cernovich’s invitation from CUCR to speak on campus. However, despite the plethora of provocative inspiration, this year’s Varsity Show opted instead to highlight cliché, showcasing the stereotypical Columbia experience rather than topicality.

Pairing emboldened reds with palliative blues, the first weekend of Barnard’s Senior Thesis Festival was a literal juxtaposition of the comically brash and the calmingly artful with the festival’s two recent directorial offerings. Both were wild in a sense—one delightfully, comically so, the other more artistically avant-garde. However, both directors were certainly wildly successful in their respective theatrical translations of their thesis productions.

Stephen Sondheim is synonymous with seminal—his works are comfortingly classic, but stimulating when reinvented aesthetically. The Columbia Musical Theatre Society’s high-concept production of “Into the Woods” juxtaposed the classical and the contemporary, with 12 actors playing over 20 fairytale roles in modern dress while still producing skillful takes on standards like “No One is Alone.”

To be or not not to be a trans play—this is the line delicately trodden in “Asterisk.” An acutely funny and touching piece, the stories of four nonbinary trans characters are thrust together in a compelling manner, poignant in its unabashed authenticity.

Ty Dolla $ign will be headlining this year’s Bacchanal spring concert, the Bacchanal Committee announced today via Instagram and at their pop-up in the Diana Center. Kamaiyah and R&B duo St. Beauty will open for them, along with student opener Soul for Youth.