A few weeks back, I was able to attend the Saturday evening showing of The Addams Family Musical at the Shubert Theater in the theater district. It was truly the last minute decision. Christy had let me know about the show and that she and some other friends would be in attendance, but I had not actually bought the ticket until a couple days prior to the show. Despite that, I still managed to get a pretty decent seat in the first row of the balcony.
The story was not an altogether unfamiliar plot for the family. Family member falls in love. That person and/or his/her family meets the rest of the Addams family and comedy ensues. In this instance, Wednesday Addams is in love with a boy. This was a little odd at first because Wednesday should have been much younger than portrayed. For the purposes of the plot, she is much older than in the traditional stories, yet Pugsley, her younger brother, is about where he needed to be. This caused a much larger than normal age gap between the two characters. Though, it didn’t really matter much as the story progressed. Most of this was told in the first few minutes of the show so that the rest of the production could focus around the boy’s parents meeting Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the clan.
Fester and Gomez, more or less, stole the show. The two actors had their parts down to a tee. Wednesday was quite cute as expected and I really couldn’t tell if Pugsley was actually being played by a boy or a girl. The sets felt pretty average, but very much in style with the rest of the production. There was one point where Pugsley was being put to bed by Morticia and as the bed shifted off stage, a tail came out of the back followed by an arm and leg coming out the side and finally a head popped out from under the foot of the bed to reveal a giant lizard type creature that was hiding underneath the bed. It was a happy surprise.
One thing I found a little strange were the seemingly forced inclusion of a couple location specific jokes including Gomez immitating Morticia’s mother as though she had a Boston accent saying “wicked pissah”. There were also a few liberal jokes that probably wouldn’t fly in more conservative portions of the country.
All things considered, I had a fun time and enjoyed the show.
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