ADDAMS FAMILY Reviews- Page 6

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 4:06am

I just want things to be intelligently constructed. I don't need substance or deep meaning. But craft and thought are important to me for any theatrical experience I have. The greatest fluff is still well-constructed and smart.

[Mildred Plotka]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 4:28am

So is Memphis a lock for score now? There's no way with the post-Tommy rules that American Idiot will be eligible. What a sad season for new scores.

[Q]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 4:38am

Popularism leads to its own kind of reward - BWay is full of examples. I seriously doubt that most opinions here fall into that category.

[Sally]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 5:02am

I will be very interested to see if this show can survive the bad reviews. When I saw it in Chicago, the reviews weren't good, but audiences (for sure the one I was in) seemed to enjoy it. Can the TIMES still kill a show (deservedly or not)?

[fashionguru_23]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 5:08am

To me, this is a "new, original" musical, and I'm happy with it. It didn't start it's life as a movie, or is filled with "pop" songs. It is a "Broadway Musical", and as crappy as it maybe, I'm still happy for it.

I'm sorry, but I will pay to see a production of "Cats" if "American Idiot" wins "Best Musical". Can the winner be something "original" (i.e. Addams Family, Everyday Rapture, etc.)

God, how I despise "Cats".

[tazber]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 6:12am

Hopefully they won't have a "best score" Tony this year. Better to just eliminate the category for a year than make a mockery of it by nominating only 2 shows, both of which had sub-par music.

At least Sunsest Blvd had some decent songs.

[gcontini2]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 6:47am

I agree with most of the reviews and think some are being too kind.

What I thought was really disappointing was just how much the low-bar aim of the writing was made glaringly apparent in contrast to the show's own technical production -- ambitious sets, costumes, inventive hair/makeup, superb lighting design, and beautiful orchestrations applied to an ungrateful score...

All of this added up to (deservedly) wow and distract an inexperienced audience (I saw it 2 nights before opening and have never seen so many tourists as a majority of an audience at a preview) with a high glitz, highly-designed Broadway production...but alas, that's not nearly enough to cover up the fact that that the show has no sincerity as a book musical with slapped together, self-conscious, and edited-by-committee writing at its core





Updated On: 4/9/10 at 06:47 AM

[GatorNY]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 7:23am

The whole question of artistic vs commercial success is so interesting. Certainly, no creative team sets out from the beginning by saying "Let's just do something that will make money, and forget about creating anything of value." But where does it go so awry? Is it a case of the emperor being naked and no one telling the him? I haven't seen this show yet, but when I sat through Shrek I felt like Dreamworks had taken advantage of my love of musicals. Although that is how I felt, I'm pretty sure that was not their intention from the get go.
All reviews aside. For me, the best reason to go see this is to see Charlie Sutton dancing on stage again. Although I'm sure it won't be in a wife beater like the last time, and the choreography won't be as sexy as Ashford's.

Updated On: 4/9/10 at 07:23 AM

[Patti LuPone FANatic]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 8:08am

NY Daily News Review:

Brand recognition — if you've got it, flaunt it. That thinking jump-starts the new musical "The Addams Family." After the famous Da Da Da Dum! Snap Snap!, Gomez (Nathan Lane) and Morticia (Bebe Neuwirth) lead their kooky clan in a moonlit anthem celebrating their ghoulish ways.

The scene, set in a spooky-cool graveyard, could be right out of a cartoon by Charles Addams, who created the characters. It makes for a tasty beginning.

Then the rest of the show arrives, and it's half-baked and already nibbled, starting with the two-cent story.

The plot spins around Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez, aptly spiky), now 18, who invites Lucas Beineke (an appealing Wesley Taylor), the Ohio boy she wants to wed, and his parents, home to meet her relatives.

Sound familiar? "La Cage aux Folles" is at the Longacre. Lane's film "The Birdcage" is available from Netflix.

Besides the recycling, writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice ("Jersey Boys") mangle the Addamses by having Wednesday tell her family to "act normal" for the Beinekes. To the Addamses, macabre is normal.

Though they've come up with eye-popping scenery, directors/designers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch ("Shockheaded Peter") miss that essential fact. Ditto Jerry Zaks, a Broadway vet hired to consult after a Chicago tryout.

Composer-lyricist Andrew Lippa ("The Wild Party") has come up with a batch of traditional songs, with no memorable breakouts. A couple of numbers are amusing, most are generic and one, "Full Disclosure," seems better suited to "Legally Blonde."

The top-flight cast works hard to sell the material. Hair greased and accent set on bizarre, Lane is a riot and carries the production with his signature silliness.

Neuwirth looks the part of Morticia but can't summon her morbid wit and has the personality of a powdered statue with deep cleavage. She comes to life, finally, for a tango choreographed
by Sergio Trujillo.

As Grandma, Jackie Hoffman mugs her way to big laughs, while Kevin Chamberlin is an adorable oddball Uncle Fester. His lunar love song is a weird-whimsical blend of story, music and stagecraft. Carolee Carmello and Terrence Mann are total pros and make the most of their thankless roles as Lucas' parents.

But by the 21?2-hour mark, "The Addams Family" really wears thin. Hearing the finale, "Move Toward the Darkness," it struck me: "Move toward the exit" was a much better idea.

[e-mail]



from RC in Austin, Texas
NY Daily News Review of

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 8:46am

NY Post - Mixed
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/not_altogether_ooky_ZVxoMHGEoaq9yJJlHa7tNI

[newintown]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 10:59am

Makes me very sad. It's no new story, though. The team had every opportunity to create something much better than what happened; and although many audience members are perfectly happy with the result, without the press behind it, it'll probably pass away after a year and a half at the most, like 9 to 5 or Legally Blonde.

[metropolis10111]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 11:16am

who knows maybe Hedwig can use the set after all....

[Patti LuPone FANatic]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 11:21am

Review by Roger Friedman's "Showbiz 411":

Will “The Addams Family” Be Critic Proof?
Published April 9, 2010

It was a long time coming, but “The Addams Family” opened last night on Broadway. The reviews are scathing, and the question is: Can a show with millions in pre-sales overcome the critics?

“The Addams Family” took in nearly $1.4 million last week in previews. It was third at the box office behind “Wicked” and “The Lion King.” A new show, not even opened, such a hit? It’s never happened before.

You could see why at last night’s premiere. Stars Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth were met with adulatory applause from an audience that was part celebrity and part real people. Among the stars who showed: Matthew Broderick (with a bodyguard no less) plus Bob and Lynne Balaban, Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi, Kathie Lee Gifford, Hoda Kodb, Tony Roberts, Tova Feldshuh, and “Ray” director Taylor Hackford.

The crowd loved the show, as did the “real” audience I saw it with a couple of weeks ago. But “The Addams Family” is taking a drubbing from theater critics. And they’re right. The show is a mess, from top to bottom. The songs by Andrew Lippa are so awful that one of them includes a comedy line about “Schindler’s List.” Ouch! What was Lippa thinking? The songs do nothing to drive the story along; many of them are just self contained, with terrible lyrics. A couple of them sound like Meat Loaf’s cast offs.

And then there’s the script: it is baffling how this slight plot line mirrors a movie in which Nathan Lane once starred: “The Birdcage.” In this version, Wednesday Addams is now more Marilyn Munster, the “normal” member of an odd family. She wants to marry a normal boy and so invites his normal family to dinner. Sound familiar? Soon this conservative Ohio couple (Terrance Mann, Carolee Carmello) are loosening up and getting wild.

“The Addams Family” grinds to a halt somewhere in there. I particularly objected to the constant references to death and love of it; the Addamses are obsessed with it, but nothing explains why or who they are. And in this version, their mansoleum of a mansion is planted in Central Park. Huh? Cousin It is seen in passing, and Grandmama (Jackie Hoffman) is the most annoying character on Broadway in many seasons.

But still: the audience wants to see this show. It various flaws will matter not, I think, to the average theatergoer. No Tony’s for the show, book or score unless the committee takes one of Grandmama’s potions before voting. But the actors will be nominated, and that should give it some help. My guess is “The Addams Family” runs for as long as Lane and Neuwirth can stand it, or need the paycheck.

And they are the pleasures of seeing the show. Lane is full of shtick. Neuwirth is quintessential Morticia even though they haven’t given her enough to do. You really have to wait into Act 2 to see Neuwirth, the former star of “Chicago,” show her stuff. She’s worth the price of admission.


from RC in Austin, Texas
Roger Friedman reviews

[morosco]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 11:33am

I guess now we'll never see a MUNSTERS musical.
Darn darn darn darn darn!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 12:40pm

Say Lah Vee

EL OH EL

[Calvin]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 12:48pm

"Lah vee!"

[adamgreer]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 1:04pm

I wonder if Lane feels like Max Bialystock does at the beginning of the King of Broadway number.

"Such reviews!..."

(Come to think of it, Lane probably wishes he were still playing Max Bialystock at this point.)

[allofmylife]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 1:21pm

All over New York, people are starring off wistfully, muttering "It sounded like such a good idea....."

[Ed_Mottershead]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 1:30pm

I know I've already thrown my two cents in, but I was really appalled by Brantley's review. No, it's not a great show. It's not even a good show. But it is not the crime against nature that Brantley would have his readers believe. Brantley seems to have been on an all-pro Fela! campaign this year, which translates into an all anti-anything else this season. And just in case anyone's forgotten, the leads in Fela! have committed to doing it in London come this fall, which means that it will end up losing money on these shores. As far as I'm concerned, Brantley can stick it up where the sun don't shine.

[bwaybri2]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 2:18pm

Thanks Ms Rogers - I thought no one caught that!!

LOL!

SLV!

[Patti LuPone FANatic]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 2:47pm

Here is Ben Brantley's (complete) NY Times Review:

Imagine, if you dare, the agonies of the talented people trapped inside the collapsing tomb called “The Addams Family.” Being in this genuinely ghastly musical — which opened Thursday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and stars a shamefully squandered Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth — must feel like going to a Halloween party in a strait-jacket or a suit of armor. Sure, you make a flashy (if obvious) first impression. But then you’re stuck in the darn thing for the rest of the night, and it’s really, really uncomfortable. Why, you can barely move, and a strangled voice inside you keeps gasping, “He-e-e-lp! Get me out of here!”

The Spanish/Transylvanian-accented Gomez Addams (Nathan Lane) leads a ghostly chorus line in “The Addams Family.”
That silent scream rises like a baleful ectoplasm from a production that generally offers little to shiver about, at least not in any pleasurable way. The satisfying shiver, of course, was what was consistently elicited by the gleefully macabre cartoons by Charles Addams that inspired this musical, as well as a 1960s television series and two movies in the early 1990s. It’s a rare American who isn’t familiar with the sinister little clan (which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 193 for whom shrouds are the last word in fashion, and a guillotine is the perfect children’s toy.

This latest reincarnation of “The Addams Family” is clearly relying, above all, on its title characters’ high recognition factor. That such faith is not misplaced is confirmed by the audience’s clapping and snapping along with the first strains of the overture, which appropriates the catchy television theme song. When the curtain parts to reveal a Madame Tussauds-like tableau of the assembled Addamses, there is loud, salutatory applause.

There they are, lined up like tombstones (appropriately, since the setting is a cemetery) and looking as if they had just stepped out of Charles Addams’s inkwell. Shrink these impeccably assembled creatures to a height of 10 inches, and you could give them away with McDonald’s Happy Meals (or, given the context, Unhappy Meals).

This is not an inappropriate thought, since this show treats its characters as imaginative but easily distracted children might treat their dolls, arbitrarily making them act out little stories and situations. The creators of “The Addams Family” — which has a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and songs by Andrew Lippa — have said they wanted to return to the spirit of the original New Yorker cartoons.

It’s true that the show has moments that quote directly from Addams’s original captions. But those captions were for a limited number of single-panel cartoons. So what to do for the rest of the evening? The answer, to borrow from Irving Berlin, is “everything the traffic will allow.”

A tepid goulash of vaudeville song-and-dance routines, Borscht Belt jokes, stingless sitcom zingers and homey romantic plotlines that were mossy in the age of “Father Knows Best,” “The Addams Family” is most distinctive for its wholesale inability to hold on to a consistent tone or an internal logic. The show, which was previously staged in Chicago, has a troubled past. The original directors, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (also the production’s designers), still retain director credit, but Jerry Zaks, identified in the program as a creative consultant, is known to have reworked the show. (The look is Charles Addams run through a Xerox enlarger, though it makes witty use of the classic red velvet curtain.)

Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch were responsible for the blissfully ghoulish little show “Shockheaded Peter,” and their darkly precious aesthetic is the opposite of that of Mr. Zaks, a veteran purveyor of Broadway razzmatazz. So a collision of sensibilities was to be anticipated.

What’s more surprising (given Mr. Brickman and Mr. Elice’s solid collaboration on “Jersey Boys”) is the ragbag nature of the script, which seems to be shaped by an assortment of mismatched approaches. The show begins with the expected milking of classic Addams perversity, in which morbidity is automatically substituted for cheerfulness. But somewhere along the way the plot becomes a costume-party rehash of the proper-boy-meets-girl-from-crazy-family story line that dates back to “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Gomez (Mr. Lane) and Morticia (Ms. Neuwirth), the heads of the family, discover to their alarm that Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez), their 18-year-old daughter, has fallen in love with Lucas Beineke (Wesley Taylor), a young man from a middle-class all-American home. What’s more, Wednesday has invited Lucas and his parents — Mal (Terrence Mann) and Alice (Carolee Carmello) — for dinner, and insists that the family try to act “normal” for the night.

That directive includes Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlin), Grandma (Jackie Hoffman), little Pugsley (Adam Riegler) and Lurch (Zachary James), the towering, taciturn butler. It is clear things will not go well when, as soon as the Beinekes arrive, Mal asks, “What is this, some kinda theme park?”

Of course it is, Mal. This is a 21st-century Broadway musical. Did I mention, by the way, that the Addams homestead in this version is in Central Park? In what appears to be a tourist-courting stratagem, the seeming strangeness of the Addamses is equated with the strangeness of New Yorkers as perceived by middle Americans. (Cue the old New York City jokes.)

But it turns out that all of us are strange in our own ways (even Beinekes), that love conquers all, and that Morticia and Gomez are really just a pair of old softies, who worry about the same things that all moms and dads do, like getting older and seeing their children leave the nest.

1 2

These worries have been set to blandly generic music by Mr. Lippa. (Sergio Trujillo did the perfunctory choreography, which includes a chorus line of ancestral ghosts.) And though the show makes fun of the greeting-card perkiness of Alice, who writes poems, listen to what Gomez sings to his daughter: “Life is full of contradictions/Every inch a mile./At the moment, we start weeping/That’s when we should smile.”

Though encumbered with a Spanish accent that slides into Transylvania, Mr. Lane is in fine voice and brings a star trouper’s energy and polish to one wan number after another. Ms. Neuwirth, whose priceless deadpan manner is one of Broadway’s great assets, here uses it as a means of distancing herself from an icky show and a formless part. Everyone else tries not to look embarrassed, though it’s not easy in a show that relies on a giant squid to solve its plot problems, makes Uncle Fester a cloyingly whimsical sentimentalist (he’s in love with the moon) and transforms Grandma into an old acid head out of Woodstock.

That squid is the work of the wonderful puppeteer Basil Twist, who also whipped up a giant iguana, a regular-sized Venus fly trap and a charming animated curtain tassel. Fans of the “Addams” television show will be pleased to learn that Thing (the bodiless hand) and Cousin Itt make cameo appearances. They receive thunderous entrance applause and then retire for most of the night. They are no doubt much envied by the rest of the cast.

OH my! I'm definitely getting a ticket for "La Cage", but should I get one for this show? from RC in Austin, Texas

[adamgreer]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 3:15pm

Why did you post the text of the entire review in the thread? There was no need for that. All you have to do is click the very helpful link that was provided.

[blaxx]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 3:21pm

It is also copyright infringement to post a complete review, which could get the thread deleted.

If it gets deleted, I would get angry.

Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry

[ifuweregay93]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 4:03pm

"If it gets deleted, I would get angry."

Why? Because you would lose record of posting all of the ****ty reviews. True, there haven't been many (very few), but I still find that hillarious.

Just sayin'...

[averagebwaynut]

Posted: 4/9/10 at 4:18pm

Blaxx -- legitimately curious...have you seen the show yet?

I ask because last I saw, you had not. I realize tone is a tricky thing to read into an online posting, but the almost palpable pleasure you seem to take in trashing this production (rightfully or not) is baffling at best and suspect at worst, in particular if indeed you haven't even bothered to see the show you apparently hate so much. Mind you, I don't think you'll like it one bit -- I'm 110% confident of that -- but should you really be among those who are at the forefront of pouring salt in the wounds of this show without even being able to have truly informed and first hand opinion?