Do
you remember the 60’s – 70’s TV show the Addams
Family, well it’s now a delightful Broadway Musical and currently
playing its Australian premier season at
Sydney’s Capitol Theatre. The orchestra strike up the overture which features
that very familiar TV show theme and at once the whole audience clapped
twice where the finger clicks come,
setting us up for the next two hours of good old family theater fair.
It’s
a lightweight musical comedy with a simple story line. Wednesday Addams, the
ultimate princess of darkness, has grown up and fallen in love with a sweet,
smart young man from a respectable family and who she plans to become engaged
to. She confides in her father and begs him not to tell her mother, which
nearly kills him as he has never kept a secret from his wife before.
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photo by Jeff Busby
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Wednesday
wants the Addams’s to meet her boyfriend and his family and has invited them to
a family dinner at the Addams mansion.
There all here the lovable larger than life spooky family: parents Gomez and Morticia, Uncle Fester, Grandma,
Pugsley and the butler Lurch, who Wednesday wants to display as a ‘normal’
family. Of course when the Beineke Family of Mal, Alice and only son Lucas
arrive the weird and wonderful all goes into fourth gear with nothing quite
going to Wednesday’s plan.
The writers Marshall
Brickman and Rick Elice, who also wrote Jersey Boys,
have captured the unique style of the TV show that combined the twisted,
macabre and just plain weird with charm and wit into a slick and witty piece
full of great one-liners and clever sight gags. The songs by Andrew Lippa
are pleasant enough with their pop and peppy melodies, although you don’t
leave humming them, do add to the story and keep up a great toe tapping pace.
