All Entries Tagged With: "Stuart Oken"

“The Addams Family” – WORD OF MOUTH

The Addams Family can’t rely on the critics, so it’s up to the fans of the show to show their support through WORD OF MOUTH. 

CLICK HERE to visit the WORD OF MOUTH post.  Scroll to the bottom and click “Comments” to share your thoughts or experiences of “The Addams Family” on Broadway, and to read others’ experiences.

“The Addams Family” A Critic-Proof Smash

This is a pretty long article, but it’s so good that I have to post it in it’s entirety.  I found these excerpts to be of particular interest to fans of the show:

“…the musical has grossed $6.5 million in five weeks… and the producers are already planning a multicity national tour.”

“…(the) President of Group Sales Box Office, a major Broadway ticket seller, said …that “The Addams Family” remained the biggest ticket advance of any Broadway show that his company has sold this year.”

A scene from “The Addams Family,” featuring Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane, which opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.

Critics May Rant, but ‘Addams Family’ Rakes It In
By PATRICK HEALY, NY Times
Published: April 13, 2010

The new Broadway musical “The Addams Family” opened Thursday to the sort of scathing reviews that would bury most shows in the graveyard next to the Addamses’ forbidding mansion.

The result: The show sold $851,000 in tickets last weekend on top of a $15 million sales advance, huge figures for a new Broadway run, and all but guaranteeing that it will be hard to snag a pair of good orchestra seats until fall. After five months of well-publicized creative difficulties for the show, this seeming paradox amounts to a theater world version of the golden fleece: the critic-proof smash.

Hollywood, pop music studios and book publishers long ago mastered the art of assembling commercially successful products that critics hate. Theater is different: Only a fraction of shows turn a profit to begin with (about 30 percent on Broadway each year), and expensive tickets, fixed performance schedules and a finite potential audience for most live theater increase the importance of reviews.

Yet “The Addams Family” seems to have cracked a formula that to various degrees made long-running hits of “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Beauty and the Beast,” ”Mamma Mia!” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” after being dismissed by many critics. Such shows have tended to attract audiences already fond of their songs or characters.

That formula for “The Addams Family” includes a beloved brand-name title, a famous star, an inoffensive script, echoes of nostalgia and some savvy commercial judgments. The producers chose a theater with an unusually large number of orchestra seats, many of which they can sell at premium prices that top out at $300 apiece. And, in an unusual move for Broadway, they recruited five regional theaters as producing partners, spreading the financial risk while also having access to their subscribers and to those theaters for a national tour.

Kevin Chamberlin as Uncle Fester and Jackie Hoffman as Grandma performing onstage in “The Addams Family.”

While the creators promised to base the musical on Charles Addams’s mordantly sophisticated cartoons in The New Yorker, they ended up adding the theme song of the “Addams Family” television show for the audience to snap-snap along with before the curtain even goes up. In hopes of improving the show between a Chicago tryout and its Broadway run, they also added broad, sometimes goofy touches like a toupee-wearing Uncle Fester and a Grandma dressed like a Red Cross nurse — images that make some people laugh, but belie the darker spirit of the Addams cartoons for others.

The producers also built a marketing campaign that would cover all the bases, using images that would remind people of the cartoons, the television show, and the “Addams Family” movies. And the casting of Nathan Lane to play the paterfamilias Gomez, through at least next March, has been especially important to the musical’s fortunes, according to several theater producers not affiliated with the show, given that he is a popular actor with both theater- and film-goers.

“If Nathan Lane is in anything you already have my money in the till, and I imagine that there are thousands of others who feel the same,” said Michael Ritchie, artistic director of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which is not associated with “The Addams Family.”

Whether the musical — which cost $16.5 million to mount on Broadway — can flourish without a well-known star like Mr. Lane is among the factors that will determine whether the show endures as critic-proof. Based on 26 major reviews for “The Addams Family,” including one in The New York Times, the theater Web site Stagegrade.com gave the show a median grade of D+. For now, however, the musical has grossed $6.5 million in five weeks — more than current hit musicals like “A Little Night Music,” “Billy Elliot,” “West Side Story” and “Wicked” did in their early weeks — and the producers are already planning a multicity national tour.

“We sought to create a musical that was not only very funny, but also surprised the audience by proving to be touching as well,” Roy Furman, one of the lead producers of the show, said in an interview by e-mail. “We are delighted that audiences have responded so strongly, as evidenced by nightly ovations, and word of mouth, which has sparked advance sales.”

Four years in the making, “The Addams Family” had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago last winter, drawing huge crowds but mixed reviews from critics there. Those reviews prompted Mr. Furman and the other lead producer, Stuart Oken, to hire the veteran Broadway director Jerry Zaks to take over the show from its two directors, the Broadway newcomers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, and ostensibly fix “The Addams Family” before opening in New York.

Opening Night of “The Addams Family” Musical

Opening Night … in pictures, courtesy of broadwayworld.com

New And Improved Addams Family Musical Hits Broadway Running

photo by Matt Hoyle

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.

Talking With Lurch (Zachary James)

Addams Family – an interview with Lurch (Zachary James)

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.