Based on the iconic characters created by legendary cartoonist Charles Addams, THE ADDAMS FAMILY is an all-new musical comedy starring Tony Award winner Roger Rees as Gomez and stage and screen star Brooke Shields as Morticia. THE ADDAMS FAMILY features an original story. It's every parent's nightmare. Your little girl has suddenly become a young woman, and what's worse, has fallen deliriously in love with a sweet, smart young man from a respectable family. Yes, Wednesday Addams, the ultimate princess of darkness, has a "normal" boyfriend, and for parents Gomez and Morticia, it's a shocking development that turns the Addams house upside down when they are forced to host a dinner for the young man and his parents.
THE ADDAMS FAMILY has a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (librettists of the 2006 Tony Award-winning Best Musical, Jersey Boys), music and lyrics by Drama Desk Award winner Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party), direction and design by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (Shockheaded Peter, The Metropolitan Opera's Satyagraha) and choreography by Sergio Trujillo (Next to Normal, Jersey Boys).
They don't give out awards for “most improved,” and “The Addams Family” did not undergo some spectacular 11th-hour artistic unification. But clear-eyed changes have moved what was a wildly uneven but ambitiously progressive affair in Chicago much more in the direction of classic, full-tilt, fast-paced, old-fashioned musical comedy — and regardless of reviews, they're almost certain to cement this immensely popular title as a commercial hit on Broadway and beyond. (The show opened on Broadway with a whopping $15-million-plus advance and has been racking up “Wicked”-like box office returns since previews).
Every moment is a furious fight for life, an act of flop-sweat corpse puppetry worthy of Weekend at Bernie’s. Practically from the moment the curtain parts—courtesy Thing, the bodiless hand—you detect the grim, gray whiff of obligation. The Addams Family, like so many large-scale theatrical entertainments today, feels every inch a Musicalized Property. (To call it a “musical” suggests more joie de mort than the show can muster.) It’s a Broadway spectacular only because it must be, not because any of its creators felt particularly inspired. Alas, one can put the defibrillator paddles to a dead body only so many times before it starts to smoke, and long before the night is over, the air in the Lunt-Fontanne is a gritty haze of unrequited effort. “When you’re an Addams,” the ensemble sings (in an instructive, repetitive, highly unpromising opening number), “you’re happy when your toes are in the mud/You smile a bit the moment you smell blood.” Poe, this ain’t. But hey, it could be worse, considering the soupy lyrical terrain on which Andrew Lippa insists on building his flimsy, prefab songs.
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