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).
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.
Move over, Wicked, there’s a new Halloween musical in town, and, unlike its predecessor, it is safe not just for 13-year-old girls but for 13-year-old boys. I am talking, of course, about The Addams Family, the snap-happy tribe whose latest, musical iteration has popped into fitful life at the Lunt-Fontanne. Amply supplied with sometimes clever, sometimes groaning vaudevillian one-liners by book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, whose last hit was Jersey Boys, and given resourceful songs by Andrew Lippa, composer of the gloriously decadent off-Broadway show The Wild Party, The Addams Family lends further life to a clan in love with death.
2010 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
2011 | US Tour |
National Tour US Tour |
2021 | UK Tour |
UK Tour |
2024 | West End |
West End |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | BroadwayWorld Awards | Best Costume Design | Phelim McDermott |
2010 | BroadwayWorld Awards | Best Costume Design | Julian Crouch |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Nathan Lane |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musica | Kevin Chamberlin |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical | Carolee Carmello |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design | Natasha Katz |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lyrics | Andrew Lippa |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Music | Andrew Lippa |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Musical | The Addams Family |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Set Design | Phelim McDermott |
2010 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Set Design | Basil Twist |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Nathan Lane |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actress in a Musical | Bebe Neuwirth |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical | Kevin Chamberlin |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical | Carolee Carmello |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Set Design | Phelim McDermott |
2010 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Set Design | Julian Crouch |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre | Andrew Lippa |
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical | Kevin Chamberlin |
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