A Look At What’s “Troubling” The Addams Family

Hiring Jerry Zaks as a “creative consultant” to the Addams Family team (see Tony Award Winner Jerry Zaks Joins Addams Family Creative Team) has left the door open for speculation that the bound for Broadway show is in trouble.  And while the producers emphasize that the show is not in trouble, they do acknowledge that the musical needs changes to improve its hopes for a long run and a potentially lucrative life as a touring production.  That makes perfect sense to me, and I feel confident that the hugely talented creative team of the Addams Family Musical will happily make the changes necessary to bring a smash hit show to Broadway on April 8. 

But it does make one wonder….what causes what many believed to be a sure-fire hit not so sure-fire?  Many have jumped at the opportunity to answer that question, and an article earlier this month by Patrick Healy of the NY Times, in my opinion, does a great job of getting to the meat of the issue: “What works brilliantly in morbidly hilarious cartoons …is a tougher trick to translate to live theater…”  And he doesnt’ stop there. Healy did his research and put together an article that takes an in depth look into the challenges of transforming “… a series of darkly witty moments — some even without captions…” into a successful Broadway musical.

That Old Black Magic, So Hard to Recapture

By PATRICK HEALY
Published: January 5, 2010, NY Times

CHICAGO — Among the dozens of cartoons that Charles Addams drew of his devilishly subversive Addams family is one in which Gomez and Morticia; their daughter, Wednesday; son, Pugsley; and manservant, Lurch, are admiring the view from their new picture window. The view is of a cemetery crowded with tombstones.

A cemetery is also the setting of the first scene of the new “Addams Family” musical, now finishing a tryout here before its scheduled arrival on Broadway in March. In that opening number, “Clandango,” the family dances and sings about loyalty to the Addams way of life; a chorus rollicks around the stage carrying gravestones; and Morticia and Wednesday team up for a mother-daughter tap dance atop a coffin.

What works brilliantly in morbidly hilarious cartoons, however, is a tougher trick to translate to live theater, as the producers of “The Addams Family” have learned.While the musical has drawn huge audiences here, it has received mixed reviews from critics and raised enough concerns for the producers that last week they took the unusual step of hiring the Tony Award-winning director Jerry Zaks to take over and work with the creative team to make 11th-hour fixes to the production, which stars Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia.

Unlike most musical adaptations for Broadway, which come from movies or books, the producers of “The Addams Family” musical chose to base their show on Addams’s cartoons, mainly published in The New Yorker magazine in the 1940s and ’50s. Preferring to eschew the slapstick humor of the popular “Addams Family” television show of the 1960s and three movies in the ’90s, the producers have said their goal was to create a musical that reflected the mordant wit of the cartoons, like the famous one of Gomez, Morticia and Lurch preparing to pour a cauldron of boiling oil on a group of Christmas carolers.

The Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, which holds the copyrights to all of Addams’s works, granted the rights for a Broadway musical to one of the show’s lead producers, Stuart Oken, because he shared the foundation’s desire “to ignore all previous interpretations of the characters known as the Addams family and to create a new story based solely upon the cartoons by Charles Addams,” H. Kevin Miserocchi, the executive director of the foundation and one of its two trustees, said in an e-mail message.

The challenge is undoubtedly steep, given Addams’s ingenuity. His influence is reflected not only in the work of generations of cartoonists but also in movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and those by Wes Craven, and television shows like “The Simpsons.” In those works, rather than coddle children, parents suggest that they turn on each other, as Morticia does in one cartoon when she tells Wednesday to stop “whining” about her maniacal brother and threaten to poison him back.

“By making us laugh at, and with, his fiendish protagonists, he makes us temporarily share those values and doubt our own,” said Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. Referring to the musical, Mr. Mankoff said, “I think to truly reflect Addams’s vision, it would have to make us see the characters onstage not as the strange, weird Other, but through humor to see ourselves.”

Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who is also a playwright, said that sustaining the unique tone and eccentric touches of a “deliciously bad family from hell” like the Addamses was an exciting challenge for a Broadway show, but also a tall order, given that many Americans have strong opinions about how Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester and the rest should look, speak and behave (badly, very badly and beyond).

“The difficulty is that people will bring their own sense of the cartoons, plus the TV shows, plus the movies, to the musical, and those sensibilities will differ,” Mr. Feiffer said. “What the producers should not do is water down the family to some lowest common denominator of behavior in hopes that the biggest audience possible will relate to the musical. In doing so, you would lose what’s special about Addams.”

If the Addams cartoon characters were decidedly off-center — living in a cobweb-strewn house, taking delight in a downpour, reveling in unhappiness — they also displayed a tender love for one another and were never actually shown harming anyone, only wickedly suggesting it, said Linda H. Davis, the author of the 2006 biography “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life.” Indeed, Addams — who based Uncle Fester partly on himself — used the cartoons to, in the words of Mr. Mankoff, “turn our assumptions about normality and its relation to good and evil upside down.”

The new musical does this at times, when Wednesday lovingly tortures Pugsley on a rack, and when Gomez and Morticia fondly recall their first date, when they saw “Death of a Salesman.” At other points the humor involves gags, and some of the character arcs — like Morticia’s laments about growing old — are at odds with the cartoons, which portray Morticia as poised and self-confident, for instance.

The producers, Mr. Zaks and the creative team of “The Addams Family” declined to comment about the creative process between Chicago and Broadway. Yet in an interview last week about the Zaks appointment, Mr. Oken said that most of the changes in the show needed to come in Act I, and chiefly involved strengthening audiences’ affection for the Addams family members before diving into a plot about the culture clash between the family and the buttoned-up parents of Wednesday’s boyfriend.

Some critics said the show also needed to be truer to the off-center spirit of the cartoons, and to be more fun. Mr. Oken did not dispute either of those points outright.

Richard Christiansen, the former theater critic of The Chicago Tribune, who sent feedback on the show to Mr. Oken at the producer’s encouragement, said in an interview that it was “tremendously hard” to transform the cartoons into a full-length, plot-driven musical, partly because Addams’s work involved a series of darkly witty moments — some even without captions — not story-driven panels.

Starting with the second scene of the musical, a relatively conventional plot kicks in about the clash of two very different families whose children are in love — not unlike that of “La Cage Aux Folles” — while scenes about the oddness of the Addamses “are too few,” Mr. Christiansen added. He said that he also told Mr. Oken that the current ending, which involves the Addams family’s squid’s providing an epiphany for the outsider family, was “not funny in the least.”

Mr. Miserocchi said that the Addams foundation had approval over the narrative and content of the musical, and that he believed the creative team “was developing their new story line and wonderful look while in faithful consideration of the Addams original works.”

“With a bit more tightening and manipulation,” he added, he said that he believed that the show would be successful. (The foundation is entitled to a share of the musical’s earnings because of its ownership of the underlying rights, but Mr. Miserocchi said that the terms were private.)

Mr. Mankoff, of The New Yorker, said he admired the producers’ ambitions to reflect the cartoons of the magazine, but he also pointed out that too much fidelity to them might be problematic.

“It would be hard to take a musical or entertainment program where the family was gleefully and endlessly plotting harm,” he said. “The real aim, I think, is to be true to what was special about Addams — that he was really prophetic about how much the gothic would infiltrate our culture, how we laugh when Freddy Krueger is making jokes while torturing people in ‘Elm Street.’ But striking the right balance will take much creativity.”