All Entries in the "AFB Exclusive" Category
Jimmy Merrill: Our Man at the Awards
Jimmy Merrill, Broadway journalist and special correspondent for the Blog, covered the Drama Desk and Drama League award ceremonies. He encountered some very prominent theater folk.
Angela Lansbury, currently starring in A Little Night Music (Drama League)
Acclaimed playwright Edward Albee (Drama Desk)
John Kander, composer of Chicago and Cabaret (Drama Desk)
Katie Finneran, Drama Desk winner for Promises, Promises (Drama League)
Alfred Molina, star of Reds and the new motion picture Prince of Persia. Molina won the Drama League Distinguished Performance award.
Mitzi Gaynor, star of the film of South Pacific (Drama Desk)
David Bryan, keyboard player for Bon Jovi, winner of Drama Desk awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Orchestrations for Memphis
Kenny Leon won the Drama League directing award for Fences (Drama Desk)
Michael Musto, Village Voice theater scribe and MSNBC commentator (Drama Desk)
Stephen McKinley Henderson of Fences, Jitney and Dracula the Musical (Drama League)
Gypsy of the Year Annie Scuso (Drama Desk)
Donna Murphy, star of Passion and Wonderful Town (Drama League)
Rick Elice Chats With AFB About “The Addams Family” Musical
Rick Elice, famed co-author of Jersey Boys, has a new project to get excited about – The Addams Family Musical, set to begin previews in Chicago on November 13. I had the privilege of chatting with Rick recently about his Addams Family experience.
Addams Family Blog: Rick, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to talk with me about The Addams Family musical. Previews start ….Friday the 13th …that’s very convenient that the date fell on Friday the 13th…
Rick Elice: Well, originally there was some idea of starting it on Halloween, and I guess that the schedule just didn’t work out, so Friday the 13th became the next obvious day – the next luckiest day for us to begin.
AFB: And I bet it will be lucky for you. How are rehearsals going?
RE: Really great. We have an amazing cast – we just have the most wonderful cast of people that’s ever been, I think. It’s such a gream droup…..a gream droup I just said … a dream group. (See, everything’s inverted with the Addams Family.) It’s a pleasure to be in the same room with them. And the audience is in for a real treat.
AFB: Do you expect to have to make a lot of changes during the Chicago “try-out?”
RE: Sure. Well, because you just said it, didn’t you, it’s a try-out. This is a brand new show, it’s not based on anything. It’s never been performed before. Soon we’re going to have an audience for the very first time ever. The last big piece of the puzzle is always when the audience arrives. And so we’re going to listen very, very carefully. And then we’re going to come back the next night, and we’re going to listen very carefully again. And we’re going to come back the next night and listen very carefully again. And after the first weekend, Marshall and Andrew and I will sit down on November 16th, and we will figure out what we need to do, in terms of the writing of the show, and then we’ll sit down with the Directors and the Designers and figure out how we can effect that. The audience will tell you things you would never, ever learn without them. I can’t wait.
AFB: Yes, and I imagine that each audience will be different throughout that weekend…..
RE: Every night, it’s brand new, and every night is learning. Neil Simon once said something very, very smart [about this] which is, “You get to take the test every single night, and watching the performance is doing your homework, and then the next day you go in, and you try to get a better grade.” And that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing. We’re shooting for an A++ on this show because why would you ever shoot for less? We’re trying to make something really, really special here which is a musical comedy – a musical comedy with heart. And there’s probably nothing harder to do. Except solving healthcare.
AFB: There’s been so much media attention already…
RE: Has there been? I’m not particularly aware of it. I haven’t been paying much attention to anything other than rehearsals. Has there been a lot of stuff?
AFB: Well, it seems that I’ve been reading about it for so long, and there are such high expectations. And with it all set to open on Broadway already, and selling tickets already.…..does that add pressure to the creative team, with all the hype, or is it maybe a relief, that it’s all set – where you’re going to go?
RE: Of course, it’s a big responsibility when people start putting their money down on the barrel head. But it’s also thrilling to know that people actually have a desire to see something. And it does help to take the pressure off because, you know, with Jersey Boys we weren’t exactly in the same situation. It was very, very hard to get people interested before the show came to town because nobody really believed it would be anything more than a (gulp) jukebox musical…….
AFB: And now people can’t even get tickets!
RE: Yeah! But before we came to Broadway, people really had kind of a wait-and-see attitude, which I understand. I would have had it too. But with Addams Family, I guess on the strength of the cast, there are people who are willing to take a risk in advance. And I’m humbled by the responsibility of knowing people are buying tickets in advance because those are the people who are really taking the flyer with you, and those are the people I really want to satisfy.
AFB: How did you and Marshall [Brickman] get linked with this project?
RE: Well, as it turns out, the gentleman who got the rights to do it, Stuart Oken, the Producer, was a colleague of mine from Disney. And Julian Crouch, one of the Directors, had talked about a project with Marshall. So when Stuart got the rights to it and went to Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch and said, “I’d like you to direct this,” they said, “Okay.” And Stuart said, “We need to think about who will write the show.” And Julian said, “There’s only one writer I know in America, and that’s Marshall Brickman.” And Stuart said, “Well, that’s funny because his writing partner is a friend of mine named Rick Elice. So why don’t we go to them?” So that’s how we were first approached. And of course, the minute Stuart said, “The Addams Family,” we said “Yes!” It did not take more than 30 seconds to convince us to do it. And then the next person to join the team was Andrew Lippa, the Composer/Lyricist, who is very, very talented. This is going to be big for Andrew. He’s written a terrific score.
AFB: There is certainly a lot of talent in that creative team.
So you were pretty familiar with the Addams family, but did you have to do a lot of research?
RE: Well, I remembered the TV show from when I was a kid. But I hadn’t seen it in 40 years, I suppose. I had actually never seen the films, but Stuart didn’t want it to be based on anything that had been done previously. All he gave us to look at were the original Charles Addams cartoons from the New Yorker. And those cartoons refreshed our memories and raised the sorts of questions about the story and character that writers try to answer. Of course, they’re not three dimensional in a cartoon. They’re just two dimensional. You have a single frame on a page in a magazine, and it’s designed to show you a visual and give you a caption that will give you a chuckle. And that’s all it’s designed to do. There’s nothing that comes before, there’s nothing that comes after.
So you can see a cartoon, for example, where the mother says to the little daughter, with the little boy in the background holding a jar with a skull and crossbones on it, “Well, don’t come whining to me. You go poison him right back.” And it’s funny, and you chuckle as you just did, and you think, “Well, what does that mean? Does that mean that the mother is encouraging one kid to kill the other one? Does that mean she doesn’t love her kids? Does that mean she does love her kids but they can’t die? Can they die? Are they human? Are they aliens?…” And you’re asking all these logic questions…(laughter from AFB)… and your head begins to implode like an old grapefruit…..And you think, “Uh-oh, this is gonna be harder than we thought…”
We had to take the characteristics from the cartoons and kind of breathe a third dimension into them, humanize them, if you will, invent a story and situation, and deliver something that the audience will find very funny, and also, hopefully very, very touching. And that was the modest assignment we gave ourselves.
AFB: How long did that take? It sounds like it must have been a long process…
RE: At least three or four hours… but maybe that long only because we stopped for lunch in the middle.
AFB: (laughing) Well, I know you’re good, but no one can be THAT good…
RE: I can’t really remember because I blocked it out. I remember being much, much younger when I started. At home I’ve learned to turn all the mirrors to the wall, and I walked into our digs in Chicago, and there was a mirror, and I thought, “Who is that strange bald man?” And realized that it was me! And I thought, “I guess we’ve been working on this show for a long time.”
AFB: (laughing, again) Maybe it’s a good thing that you didn’t have preconceptions from the movies because a lot of people will have the TV show in mind, or have the movie in mind. They may come to the show thinking that Gomez should act like Raul Julia, or …
RE: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he should act like Raul Julia, maybe he should act like Nathan Lane. I think the character is going to act like whomever you cast. We went in the direction of Nathan because Nathan agreed to read the script for us at a very early stage. And he was so spectacularly brilliant that we had to write it for him, and so we wrote it with his voice in mind. And so it really is sort of based on him. But that was a decision we made, not because we decided that Gomez should be funny but because Nathan suddenly seemed to bring a whole pallet of colors to playing this role that people have never seen him do. In addition to being screamingly funny. And I think he sensed that too – that this was a real opportunity for him – that this was something that he should do.
What we did was create our own situation and tried to play it out…“What would happen if…?” And we came up with an archetypical situation that we thought a lot of people could identify with. Because I think identifying with the characters is really important, especially when they’re strange. And over the course of the evening I think people will come to realize that the Addams family is really just sort of like any other family living on the upper west side of Manhattan. Maybe just somewhat more peculiar. But really pretty much like everyone else.
AFB: Well, you’ve already answered my last three questions…
RE: With my blabbering on and on and on??
AFB: Certainly not blabbering! But apparently we were on the same wavelength. I do want to ask, though, if you have a favorite character? Was there one that was particularly fun for you to write for?
RE: (hesitantly) Well… that’s like asking me who my favorite child is. That’s a tough question because even if I had an answer, I could never tell you what it was because that would be wildly indiscreet. But I must say that I’ve fallen in love with this family. I find it to be, even when the show is at it’s silliest, I find it to be very, very touching. Because what our little story is about, what the theme (and I don’t mean the plot), but what the theme of our story is about is very moving to me – very moving. Because it’s a theme of acceptance. And accepting not just the people around you for all of their quirks, but accepting that a little mystery in life is a very, very good thing. And that’s what I really loved writing about. I loved writing about the idea that I – who have lived all my life trying to shed light on every situation so that I would always know what was waiting for me around every corner – in order to rule out life’s many unpleasant surprises, also sometimes would rule out life’s pleasant surprises. And that if you, shall we say, embrace the darkness of what lies ahead, you can actually enjoy your life a lot more. So to me, my life has actually changed by having written this show. I’ve learned a big life lesson by writing about it that I never would have been able to have absorbed simply by being told about it by a well-meaning friend or (chuckle) psychoanalyst.
AFB: And you get paid for it – you didn’t have to pay an analyst.
RE: Well, in theory – in theory we’ll get paid for it, too. That depends on what the audience thinks of it.
AFB: Well, it sounds like the audience is going to love it. I’m so excited about the show, and I can’t wait to see it. It sounds like it’s going to be wonderful, and definitely live up to the expectations that people have for it.
RE: From your mouth, Catherine. From your mouth…
AFB: Rick, it was an absolute pleasure talking with you. Thank you again for taking the time to chat about The Addams Family.
