Archive: Arts & Entertainment

A long time ago Broadway musicals were light fare with clever books and hummable accessible music that managed to comment on life's tribulations with a wink while taking you away from your troubles for a couple of hours.  It's not that I don't appreciate Sondheim with his dark themes and classic, operatic approach.  Let's face it -- Rogers and Hammerstein's Carousel is one of the darkest musicals in the history of musicals, but it is also light hearted and melodic in a way that requires no cultural reach.

It is also generally true that remakes of silly television series in any medium don't work.  So I figured that the Adaams Family musical would be fun for the nostalgia and the stellar cast, but the musical would be fair on dreadful, missing the feel of the original cartoons and the beloved television series with music stereotypically Broadway/Loyd Webberesque.

I couldn't have guessed more wrong.  The Adaams Family is a delightful romp with its roots firmly planted in 60s musical tradition with a delightful twist of vaudeville.  It beautifully captured the characters from past beloved incarnations without mimicking them.  The musical starts some years after the television series ended.  Wednesday is old enough to have fallen in love and want to get married.  She convinces her parents to invite his parents for dinner.  Of course her finance's family is straight-laced mid-western.  Put New Yorkers in a room with Ohioans, Monsters with humans, and let the merriment begin.

Nathan Lane's Gomez was... well, Nathan Lane.  Joyful, way over the top, emotionally spot on.  Isn't that what you go to a Nathan Lane show to see?  He never disappoints.  Bebe Neuwirth's Morticia was equally delicious, as she maneuvered her character through a mid-life (life?) crisis.  The two were believable as a married couple dealing with the surprises their children throw at them along with relationship issues that every married couple faces.  Kevin Chamberlin gave a standout performance as Uncle Fester, who was, perhaps, the most ridiculous character on stage while somehow being the most grounded when it came to what really matters.  And the chorus of dead Adaamses was a stroke of brilliance.

I hesitate to talk about the plot at all, for fear of spoilers.  All the little twists, including cameo appearances by Thing and Cousin It, and new revelations about Grandma were delightful surprises, winks to the audience.  Yet the play did not become mired in the past as it forged ahead in the present.  It had plenty to offer a modern audience, and even had a New York City snobbery joke that the local audience loved (and Ohioans would also love for its unabashed mockery of New York City snobbery).

I did wish for a really fabulous tango.  Gomez and Morticia, Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth -- the characters and the actors virtually scream for it, but their dance, when it inevitably came, seemed tepid for talents that do over-the-top better than just about any other living actors. And -- this is just me, because Wednesday was always my favorite Adaams with her determined darkness (could anything be more delicious than Wednesday's fiendish response to summer camp in 'Adaams Family Values'?! -- Wednesday almost threatened to be too cheerful for my liking.  But Krysta Rodrigues's Wednesday pulled it off in the end.  I have to say that I loved that Wednesday had grown up into a young lady of marriageable age (who knows how old an Adaams really is?), but Pugsley didn't seem to have aged a bit.  Adam Riegler's Pugsley was... well, exactly Pugsley.  Little kid, lover of torture and all things explosive -- he was it!  (Not Cousin It -- that's someone else.)

The music was in-the-moment delightful, though it would have been nice if there was at least one memorable song that you could go out humming.  I'm of the school that you serve the play, not the NPR audience and cast album sales, so I didn't really mind, and I still have some of the music rattling around in my head, and when you consider that it is MY head, it must be somewhat memorable.  But really, no standout hit songs.

My only other complaint was how much was made of Morticia's legs.  I thought that was a cheap joke partly because it was unbelievable that Gomez wouldn't know his wife has them, and partly because I missed her tentacles from the original comic and the TV series.

However, there were plenty of tentacles in the show to please any cephalopod enthusiast.  In fact, all the puppetry was marvelous.  Again, not wanting to give anything away, I will say that various creatures and animated inanimate objects were pretty great, as were Fester's airborne jaunts.

And the design elements -- the sets might as well have been a character in the play, perfectly capturing the 'house is a museum when people come to see-em' look with a distinctly M.C. Escher approach.  The house and its graveyard, mysteriously hidden in Central Park, were easily as Adaamsy as the Adaamses.  Even the house curtain got into the act, neatly dancing into configurations that framed the action.  Costumes were spot on, as was the lighting.  Many of the effects depended on the lighting, which was precise and in character at the same time, not easy to achieve.

Before the advent of heavy, 'important' musicals my measure of a Broadway show was how I felt coming out of the theater.  By that measure The Adaams Family earns the highest marks.  In fact, the whole audience was on an Adaams high from the very first moment as they clapped to the trademark 'snap snap' in the Adaams theme and cheered Thing at the beginning, and went uphill from there.  That high lasted well into the night, as audience members floated, Fester-like, into Times Square, appropriately for us, on Halloween weekend.

The feel-good Broadway musical is back.  Da-da-da dum.  Snap!  Snap!

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