Chillin’ with The Addams Family @ Playhouse Square 4/10/12
Reviewed by Laura Kennelly
The Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons appeal to the mordant side of my sense of humor so I was prepared to like The Addams Family, the latest show in the Broadway Series national tour presented by Playhouse Square. And so I did. No, it didn’t set the stage on fire, but it is a pleasant musical with beautiful sets, very fine ensemble dancing, cute spooky gimmicks (thanks, Basil Twist), and the expected opening theme from the television show of the same name, complete with finger-snaps to get everyone in the right mood.
But the show reveals that times have changed. When Addams originally created his “family” in the 1930s it was amusing to think that such quirky characters, the glam Morticia and her Latin lover hubby Gomez and their sweet little kiddies, lived in a haunted house with spooks and yet thought they were just average. Readers knew they were not normal–that was part of the joke. Today fiction, films and television are replete with vampires, ghosts, zombies and more and audiences have come to see them as “normal” (or at least not shocking). Probably part of the joke this time around is that the weirdest people in the show are visitors from Ohio.
While devious little Wednesday Addams (Cortney Wolfson) has some great moments torturing her brother Pugsley (played with droll humor by Patrick D. Kennedy), it’s the introduction of her fiancé (Brian Justin Crum) and his parents (all from Ohio) to her family that brings out the real conflict.
Martin Vidnovic (Mal Beineke) and Crista Moore (Alice Beineke) put the “Oh” in Ohio with their fabulously over-the-top performances as the seemingly sedate and reserved visitors. Things get comic fast when the amazingly talented Moore comes unglued (through no fault of her own) at the dinner party in a hysterically funny scene that turns our preconceptions of her inside out.
Gomez and Morticia are more problematic. On Broadway one reason the show lasted as long as it did (2010 to 2011) may have been the star factor. Originally, Bebe Neuwirth played Morticia. Characterization of the acerbic ghostly glamour gal was helped since we already “knew” that woman as the caustic Lilith, Frazier’s wife on TV’s Cheers and Frazier. The Broadway Gomez was the cutely tubby Nathan Lane, an actor who is funny, but not too sexy, so when he romanced the frosty gorgeous Morticia, it was more comic than otherwise. That works less well with the dashing Douglas Sills as Gomez and Sara Gettelfinger as Morticia, mostly because they are given very little by the writers to work with other than our preconceived notions about their characters.
Of course, there was suspense–especially about Morticia’s costume. Was I alone in wondering how on earth Morticia kept her low-cut V-neck dress from a wardrobe malfunction? The style seems true to the Charles Addams cartoons, but it’s easier to wear in a drawing than in real life. The idea that perhaps it was prosthesis–all part of the costume, a breastplate as it were, seemed vaguely comforting…
Overall: Lots of fun, but your next door neighbors are probably scarier.
The show runs until Sun 4/22 at the Palace Theatre in Playhouse Square. For tickets call 216-241-6000 or go to http://PlayhouseSquare.org.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.