Oh, who cares? I mean, besides the producers who sunk millions into this nostalgia machine, and those starstruck Drama Club brats bussed in from the suburbs for a night, and of course the baby boomer fans of the '60s TV series, does anyone out there really give a damn whether this big Broadway adaptation of The Addams Family is actually "good"? If your tween wants to see it, you'll buy a ticket, no matter what the reviews say, and if you're a tourist hankering for a superficial spectacle, you'll step right up, too. (And they have been—the theater was filled to 100% capacity in recent weeks.) But are any real New Yorkers out there actually wondering whether this rote extravaganza, ostensibly inspired by Charles Addams's cartoons in The New Yorker, is worth the average ticket price of $100?
To be fair, it's not nearly as dreadful as some have made it out to be. Disappointing, yes, but there's some clever stuff here, and it's well-paced, periodically funny, impressively staged, and designed to dazzle the eye. It's the ear that gives the game away. With the exception of some big show-stoppers that are redeemed by the brash, Broadway choreography of Sergio Trujillo, Andrew Lippa's score is at best instantly forgettable, and at worst enough to make you fashion an origami noose out of your Playbill. This first longing for a cup of cyanide comes early in the first act, when Wednesday (the talented Krysta Rodriguez) sings her little heart out on "Pulled," a painfully punishing pile of pop pabulum.
The story, for anyone actually still debating buying into this, concerns Wednesday's love for a "normal" yuppie kid from Ohio, whose square parents aren't the type to approve of the Addams family's gothic, big city lifestyle. Needless to say, Gomez and Morticia are none too pleased with Wednesday's intention to marry into a family so lacking in morbid curiosity. Though they make an effort to behave "normally" when hosting her boyfriend's family for dinner, you can't fit a round corpse into a square hole, and the Addamses can only contain their macabre mania for so long. Spoiler: In the end everybody learns a lesson about accepting their true selves.
That the ensemble almost compensates for the charmless score and dull narrative is hardly surprising; Nathan Lane (Gomez), Bebe Neuwirth (Morticia), Kevin Chamberlin (Uncle Fester), Jackie Hoffman (Grandma) and Terrance Mann (Mal Beineke) are all delightful in their own way. Were they were given a better score and a book that wasn't so hesitant to revel in the source material's pitch black comedy, the thing might be a wickedly funny diversion, not just a monetary success. But we suspect Harold Ross, who created the great magazine that gave Charles Addams a home, might very well cringe: This is predictable hokum, edited for the old lady in Dubuque.
