ADDAMS FAMILY Reviews

[LimelightMike]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 1:08pm

Today is Thursday, April 8, marking the official opening of THE ADDAMS FAMILY - inspired by the legendary illustrations from Charles Addams in The New Yorker - at the Lunt-Fontanne on 46th. Previews began March 8. The tuner has a book by Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman, and music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa.

Two-time Tony Award winners, Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth star as Gomez and Morticia. The pairing is joined onstage by daughter Wednesday(Krysta Rodriguez); son Pugsley (Adam Riegler); Grandma (played by Jackie Hoffman); Lurch (Zachary James); and Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlin).

According to production notes, "In this original story, the famously macabre Addams Family is put to the test when outsiders come to dinner, hurling Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Fester, Grandmama and Lurch headlong into a night that will change the family forever."

Best to all involved.


Updated On: 4/8/10 at 01:08 PM

[taylorPHENOMENON2]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 1:14pm

THIS should be interesting.

[dramadude]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 2:00pm

I thought I beat you to the punch this time, LimelightMike?



"THE ADDAMS FAMILY" Reviews

[lizliz]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:07pm

The Wall Street Journal is on the fence, but trending positive.

So what's good about "The Addams Family"? Ms. Neuwirth, for openers, whose cool, leggy hauteur is impossible to resist. Mr. Lane works hard all night long (you can see him sweating), almost always to good effect. The fantastically elaborate set, designed by Messrs. McDermott and Crouch, evokes with gratifying exactitude the eerie parallel universe of the Addams cartoons. The dialogue scenes, though at all times rigidly predictable, are often quite funny. And Basil Twist, America's most creative puppeteer, has staged a black-magic flying scene for Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlin) that is downright poetic.

What's not so good? Mainly Mr. Lippa's songs, which are unamusingly jokey ("You have to see the world in shades of gray / You have to put some poison in your day") and tuneless to boot. Every time one of the characters starts singing, "The Addams Family" throttles down to a crawl. Since the musical numbers take up roughly half of the show's running time, this is—to put it mildly—a major problem, one that Sergio Trujillo's anodyne choreography for a chorus line of corpses does nothing to solve. And I, for one, wish that something surprising had happened in the course of the evening.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303411604575168152141751426.html

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:16pm

Proofread much, Wall Street Journal?

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:23pm

You'll laugh a lot, though never during the unmemorable songs, which are supposed to be funny but aren't. You're more than likely to spend a considerable part of the evening wondering how much the set cost. And as you depart the theater, you'll probably catch yourself wondering whether it was really, truly worth it to take your kids to a goodish musical whose tickets are so expensive that you can buy an iPad for less than the price of four orchestra seats.

Not only is that a mixed to negative review, it also seems to had been written by the 13-year-old nephew.

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:28pm

Maybe they're paid per comma, blaxx.

[allofmylife]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:34pm

No matter how this turns out, it could have been so much better.

The Addams cartoons are an American classic and should have been written and directed by talents who could give Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane - two other American classics - world class material to work with. Instead, we seem to have ended up with a hodge-podge.

I pray for good reviews, but gird my loins for the worst....

[frontrowcentre2]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:44pm

Has there been any word on what the advance sale for this show is? That could be the only thing to keep it going.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 5:55pm

3 stars out of 5 from FT.com (which also appears to be written by the 13-year-old nephew).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e8654dc4-432b-11df-9046-00144feab49a.html

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.

Updated On: 4/8/10 at 05:55 PM

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 6:10pm

I can't wait to read their book on the history of the Halloween musical. Ugh.

[wendilin622]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 6:24pm

Last I heard, advance was doing extremely well. I heard that weekend matinees were sold out through June/July but I'm not sure how accurate that is....

Regardless of reviews, I bet this lasts the summer, at the very least.

[kidbroadway2]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 6:42pm

So far its doing better than I expected (NOT getting slammed), but the only one that really matters in the NYT. If it gets mixed instead of getting slammed, it'l last till the summer at least.

[MiracleElixir]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 6:52pm

Can't believe the reviews are so middling so far... I was expecting a bloodbath.

[Sauja]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 6:55pm

I think a mixed review from the Times would have this show running for ages. There really isn't a ton of competition for kid friendly shows out there right now, especially since The Lion King and Marry Poppins have run forever.

I will say this: all the negative word of mouth has had me avoid this completely, but now that I know Basil Twist created puppetry for an Uncle Fester number, I might have to try it out anyway.Well, that and the fact that I feel sure Jackie Hoffman can make even the worst jokes still funny.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:07pm

This Chicago Tribune man orgasmed at the changes from the out-of-town.

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2010/04/addams-family-broadway-musical-review-nathan-lane-bebe-neuwirth.html

They don't give out awards for “most improved,” and “The Addams Family” did not undergo some spectacular 11th-hour artistic unification. But clear-eyed changes have moved what was a wildly uneven but ambitiously progressive affair in Chicago much more in the direction of classic, full-tilt, fast-paced, old-fashioned musical comedy — and regardless of mixed reviews, they're almost certain to cement this immensely popular title as a commercial hit on Broadway and beyond. (The show opened on Broadway with a whopping $15-million-plus advance and has been racking up “Wicked”-like box office returns since previews).

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:11pm

Variety is negative except for Lane, and other cast members.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117942554.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

"The Addams Family" -- the 1960s sitcom, that is -- was famously kooky, spooky and altogether ooky. The new Broadway musical, based not on the sitcom but on assorted one-panel cartoons drawn over the years by the New Yorker's Charles Addams, is kooky but not spooky or ooky; nor is it neat, sweet or petite (as the song goes). What this "Addams Family" has is the gloweringly perfect Nathan Lane, who gamely thrusts Gomez's rapier at anything -- or any joke -- that moves. But $16.5 million has brought forth an ill-formed one-dimensional cartoon with lines and shading not quite inked in.

Updated On: 4/8/10 at 07:11 PM

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:15pm

The AP is negative as well (if you want to be generous, mixed-to-negative):

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wirestory?id=10325464&page=1

If you want to know why musical comedy is such a difficult art form to master, a prime example is now on display at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre where "The Addams Family" has fitfully burst into story and song.

In attempting to give Charles Addams' macabre characters a life beyond the brilliant single-panel cartoons that appeared for years in The New Yorker, the creators of this schizophrenic musical have made them more audience friendly. But in a perverse way, they're not as much fun.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:17pm

Hollywwod Reporter is negative (so far most just seem to feel bad for the two leads):

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/the-addams-family-theater-review-1004081703.story

Bottom Line: Even the talents of Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth can't make this musical adaptation of the familiar property more than just ho-hum.
As with so many high-concept Broadway shows these days, one gets the feeling from "The Addams Family" that artistic inspiration pretty much ended with the pitch meeting. It's as if once Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia Adams were on the table, all of the creatives felt they could take it easy.

[allofmylife]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:17pm

I can read the review and the upshot is that the show aims to be "The Producers" and ends up as "Young Frankenstein."

They rave about Fester and the daughter.

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:19pm

"But it's a bad idea to have Fester wonder at intermission if the audience will "leave in an hour feeling vaguely depressed," and a worse one to start the show with 15 seconds' worth of that finger-snap theme from the sitcom, which turns out to be the evening's catchiest musical moment."

HA!

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:21pm

I see it works now, allofmylife, thanks.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:29pm

Backstage is negative

http://www.backstage.com/bso/reviews-ny-theatre-broadway/ny-review-the-addams-family-1004081735.story

"The Addams Family" is a musical all dressed up with no place to go. There's one simple reason: Nobody knew why they were writing it. There is no animating purpose to the evening, except to throw well-known characters on stage so the audience can luxuriate in their comforting familiarity. Charles Addams' iconic cartoon creations have been robbed of all subversiveness, something even the 1960s TV series—made in a considerably more socially conservative era—didn't do. The thin wisp of plot—daughter Wednesday wants to marry a "normal" boy from Ohio—in Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's choppy book serves mostly to muddy the comic strip's iconography, and their inclusion of a subplot involving Morticia's fears of aging only compounds the problem. They've also come up with one of the flimsiest excuses for a chorus since Captain Jim romanced Rose Marie in the heyday of operetta.

Updated On: 4/8/10 at 07:29 PM

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:29pm

Brantley is Negative

Alright The New York Times review has not been published yet, but it is a foregone conclusion it is going to be negative.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/8/10 at 7:31pm

If this ain't a bloodbath, it's pretty close.