Tony Award Winner Jerry Zaks Joins Addams Family Creative Team
admin | Dec 29, 2009 | Comments 0
- Jerry Zaks
According to the New York Times, Addams Family producers announced Monday that Tony Award winning director Jerry Zaks has been hired as a “creative consultant” to supervise significant changes to the production, now in it’s final week of try-outs in Chicago.
Stuart Oken (producer) said that feedback he has received “is that perhaps we were taking a little too much for granted assuming that the audience walks in with the relationship with the Addams family fully intact, and we didn’t appropriately reconnect the audience to the family members.”
The original creative team will remain in tact, with Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch still listed as the directors and production designers, but Mr. Zaks will apparently be “running the show”.
According to the Times article, Mr. Zaks is close to Mr. (Nathan) Lane, having directed him in the long-running Broadway musical revivals of “Guys and Dolls” in 1992 and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1996, for which Mr. Lane won the Tony Award for best actor in a musical. Mr. Oken and Mr. Furman said Mr. Lane neither demanded nor requested that Mr. Zaks or any other show doctor be hired.
Kudos to the Addams Family team for not being too vain to admit that they needed a little help, and going out and getting it. After all, that’s what a try-out is all about - if you find that some things don’t work, you fix them.
To read the entire Times article, click here.
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