Theater: The Addams Family

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

New York

(877) 250-2929

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

**

“It’s a rare American who isn’t familiar with the sinister little clan” known as The Addams Family, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Since first appearing in cartoon form in The New Yorker in 1938, the creepy, kooky kinfolk created by Charles Addams have haunted popular culture—in a television series, movies, and now a Broadway musical. For their latest reincarnation, the brood is led by Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, who do their best to light up the Great White Way with a little dark humor. But the material they’re given is woeful—“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 musical is ghastly—and not in a good way.

As is the case with many Broadway shows these days, “one gets the feeling that artistic inspiration pretty much ended with the pitch meeting,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. The predictable plot involves the courtship of oddball teenage daughter Wednesday by a straight-laced Ohio boy. When his family comes to the Addams mansion for dinner, they become the butt of a handful of macabre gags. Scriptwriters Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman, who gave us Jersey Boys, “seem to have phoned it in” here, and songwriters Andrew Lippa and Larry Hochman give the cast little to sing about. “It’s as if, once Lane and Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia Addams were on the table, all of the creatives felt they could take it easy.”

They were only partly wrong, said David Finkle in Theatermania.com. Marquee stars Lane and Neuwirth do turn out to be perfectly cast, and they deliver as expected. “In long wig and cleavage-focused black gown,” Neuwirth makes a sly Morticia, while Lane “works every one of his formidable performing tricks” as Gomez. The two seem to be enjoying themselves—as do audience members, who finger-snap along as the memorable theme from the TV show is played. Sure, the jokes may be warmed over, but there’s just enough spooky fun to keep The Addams Family from becoming “a complete calamity.”