All Entries Tagged With: "Jerry Zaks"

Chicago sees The Addams Family National Tour Show as “significantly improved and far more satisfying”

Successfully remade ‘Addams Family’ adds the charm missing from Broadway version

Cast of The Addams Family

Chris Jones
Theater critic, The Chicago Tribune 
1:32 p.m. CST, December 28, 2011

“The Addams Family” is not the first musical whose first national tour has been infinitely better than the Broadway production that gave birth to it: such past shows as “Big” and “The Civil War” were also greatly improved. But in most of these rare cases, different directors have retooled existing material. It’s hard to think of another show that has been revised so heavily and, for the most part, successfully, by its admirably indefatigable original authors and composer.

“The Addams Family” that return(ed) to Chicago…(did) not come with Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth and the sense of must-see excitement and pumped-up pizazz that pervaded its pre-Broadway engagement at the Oriental Theatre in 2009. That’s the downside. But if Gomez, Morticia and the crew do not arrive like rock stars, this enjoyable if visually simplified national tour features many different songs from the Chicago tryout and a significantly improved and far more satisfying story.

And yes, it is plenty different enough that fans of the “Addams Family” franchise, especially those who have followed this show through its various traumas and trajectories (which we’ve extensively reported in these pages), might find it worth buying a cheap seat at the back and seeing what has gone on since Uncle Fester last fell in love with a Chicago moon. If you’re interested in seeing how multimillion-dollar shows can morph, you’ll find it quite fascinating. And I’ll guarantee you one thing: it won’t seem like the same show.

Finally, the director Jerry Zaks (who replaced Phelim McDermott during the first Chicago run) has been allowed to finish his kind of classic musical-comedy approach, most of the buzz-killing structural issues in the book have been resolved and, perhaps most importantly of all, everyone on the stage now comes off as sufficiently loose and relaxed that the zesty one-liners get to do their collective thing, and the show is actually allowed to be unpretentious and funny. This third shot at the piece by writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and composer Andrew Lippa most certainly has the most charm and efficacy. If only everyone had started somewhere near here. But then, if this stuff were easy, everyone would do it.

Opening Night of “The Addams Family” Musical

Opening Night … in pictures, courtesy of broadwayworld.com

Addams Family Musical Stars Chat with USA Today

by Todd Plitt, USA Today

‘Addams Family’ stars: Kooky, spooky, in no way spoofy

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth may be dressed in black — a color also favored by Gomez and Morticia Addams, whom they play in the new Broadway musical The Addams Family— but there’s not a whiff of the macabre in the stars’ relaxed conversation.

And perhaps that’s fitting. Based on the Charles Addams cartoons that inspired the hit TV series of the 1960s, this new adaptation — with a book by Jersey Boys librettists Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and a score by Andrew Lippa— presents a happy, loving family. “It’s just that everything they like happens to be the opposite of what ‘normal’ people like,” Lane says.

Chatting hours before a recent preview at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where The Addams Family opens April 8, Lane and Neuwirth discuss the pressures and pleasures of bringing their iconic characters to the stage.

Q: When did you first become familiar with the Addams Family?

Neuwirth: I watched the show on television as a little girl, then discovered the cartoons when I got a bit older.

Lane: I watched the show first, too, and loved it.

Neuwirth: Did you want to be Gomez?

Lane: Nah, I didn’t project myself into it. I just thought it was really fun and different. It only ran for a couple of seasons, but they were obviously memorable.

Q: How about Morticia, Bebe? She’s the first character you’re creating for a new Broadway musical.

Neuwirth: I loved Morticia so much as a girl. I think many women love her; she’s really archetypal. So it’s very important to me that she’s represented properly — that she doesn’t have anything dopey to do or say, or anything that isn’t honest. I feel I have to take care of her.

Q: Word is that this show takes its spirit from Charles Addams’ cartoons. Is there anything that will surprise people who are only familiar with the TV series?

Neuwirth: Its depth.

Lane: Yes, I think we win them over with humor and then …

Neuwirth: Then we sock ‘em in the solar plexus!

Lane: People will expect to laugh and have a good time, but maybe not to be moved by it. But there are some very touching moments.

Neuwirth: The big musical theater moments are there, but they happen in a way that’s true to the Addams Family. There are no sequins on this stage. Nobody wears anything shiny.

Q: Gomez and Morticia are a pretty hot couple. How do you get that chemistry across?

Neuwirth (coyly): You’ll see. Look, these people love each other, they love their family. They love their pets. The boy (the Addams’ son, Pugsley, played by Adam Riegler) has a big lizard, but he loves it like a puppy dog.

Lane: It’s just great fun to be them, you know? For me, it’s been joyous to play someone who is so positive about everything. That’s the opposite of me.

Q: After the show’s run in Chicago last year, (veteran director) Jerry Zaks was brought in as a creative consultant. There was speculation that the darker, more sophisticated humor of the cartoons didn’t translate for audiences expecting to see the TV show replicated. Any truth to that?

Neuwirth: That had nothing to do with it. The show was very good in Chicago; we packed the house every night, and they stood up and cheered. But a good show can get better.

Lane: The producers felt we needed a fresh pair of eyes, and fortunately, Jerry agreed to work with us. And he’s been able to come in like a Jewish Ty Pennington and give us an extreme makeover. But that’s how shows have been created for years — friends give advice, people help.

Neuwirth: You go out of town, you make changes and it keeps evolving.

Lane: Of course, this is a high-profile show, so everyone’s got an opinion. People say (affects a lofty tone), “It’s the most highly anticipated musical of the season.” It’s like you’re being set up for a fall. We’ve done a tremendous amount of work, and there’s more to come. A lot of fun, but a lot of work, too.

New And Improved Addams Family Musical Hits Broadway Running

photo by Matt Hoyle

Seth Rudetsky Lunches With The Ladies of “The Addams Family”

On a recent Thursday, actor, writer, music director and Chatterbox host Seth Rudetsky had the pleasure (so it seems) of lunching with the ladies of The Addams Family.  He shares that experience in his February 1 Playbill.com article ONSTAGE & BACKSTAGE: Here’s to the Ladies Who Lunched:

“…On Thursday I had lunch at delicious 44×10 with Bebe Neuwirth, Krysta Rodriguez, Carolee Carmello and Jackie Hoffman, who are the four leading ladies from the The Addams Family musical.  I’m writing a feature on them for the March Playbill, and we had a great/delicious time.  If you’ve seen Jackie’s Joe’s Pub shows, you’d know that she’s always complaining about not getting gigs. One of her biggest laments is about not even being able to get an audition for Fiddler on the Roof. Well, true to form, as soon as we sat down, she noticed that her bread plate was empty and she quipped, “Look! It’s just like Broadway.  I didn’t get a roll.”   Brava on the double meaning.  I bit into my delicious roll and asked her what the audition was like for the role of Grandma.  She remembered that she looked at the scene and noticed there was a little salty language in it, so she figured she could do one of her original songs.  The language in her act is more than a little salty, and this particular song is about her resenting being asked to do non-stop benefits.  It begins with:  “F*** you for asking me to do a show for free!” and then repeats that theme many times.  When the song was over, she received a sea of blank faces… and no call back.  However, that was for the initial workshop, and later on she was asked to go in again…this time for the Chicago-to-Broadway production.   She was slated to do the Doug Cohen/Douglas Carter Beane musical Big Time, which would mean that she’d have to choose between the two if she got cast as Grandma.  She knew she couldn’t sing the same song she sang before (non-stop cursing = blank British faces), so she decided to sing one of her songs from Big Time because it was fabulous and always brought down the house.  She told me that she “had the chutzpah” to call the composer and ask for a copy of the music…but not tell him she was using it to audition for a show that would prevent her doing his show!  He got the sheet music to her, she auditioned and got Addams Family and subsequently chose to leave Big Time.  Doug Cohen, the composer, called her a few days later and warily asked, “Jackie, did you use my song for your Addams Family audition?”  Jackie admitted she did.  She told me that she then literally heard a wail emanate from the phone.  The good news is Big Time was postponed, so hopefully she can eventually do both shows!

Speaking of auditions, Carolee was starring in Mamma Mia! when she was asked to come in for the reading of Addams Family.  She looked over the monologue and was surprised that there were all of these great Broadway ladies at the audition. S he then found out that the audition wasn’t for the reading, it was for the Broadway production!  She frantically took out the monologue and this time gave it more than a once over.  Apparently, she sassed her audition because she got the role of Alice Beineke.  She and Terrence Mann (the original Rum Tum Tugger in Cats) play a couple who are visiting the Addams family manse.  She told me that she and “Terry” have a completely different style of acting in a show eight times a week.  Carolee loves to figure out how something should be played and then lock it in.  Terry, who plays Mal Beineke, likes to make different choices each night.  And, I mean different.  Bebe said that there’s one entrance he does that has a totally new take each night.  At one performance it was sultry and seductive, and Bebe whispered to Nathan (Lane), “Here comes Barry White.”  The next night it was high energy and rock n’ roll-ish, and Nathan whispered, “Look.  It’s Rum Tum Mal.”
The ladies were all telling me that Jackie has a section of the show where she gets to improv, and I asked for an example.  Bebe told her to tell me about the Dec. 31 line.  Apparently, on that night, Grandma croaked out, “It’s New Year’s Eve.  I’m going to go up to my room for some Dick.  (long pause).  Clark.”

We were all talking about Jerry Zaks, who is coming in to oversee the production, and Bebe mentioned that he was in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof. I nodded, but then said I thought it was the national tour.  She was adamant that it was the Broadway production because he knew a family friend of hers who played the Constable.  I then said that the Grease tour was his first big credit, and that happened in the 70’s and Fiddler was more of a 60’s show.  I mentioned that maybe the Constable did the tour as well.  I could tell the whole table was annoyed at my obsession with minutiae, so I decided to get to the bottom of it.  I whipped out my cell phone and texted Jerry.  Of course Jackie yelled, “You have his cell phone number?  I don’t have his cell phone number!”  I ignored her and typed away.  I wrote that I needed to know whether he did Fiddler on Broadway or on tour.  Lunch ended before I heard back from him, but as I walked up Ninth Avenue I got his text:  ”Alas.  Only on tour.”  HA! I don’t want to say, “I told you so, Bebe,”…so I’ll write it:  I told you so, Bebe…”

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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.

Tony Award Winner Jerry Zaks Joins Addams Family Creative Team

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.