THE ADDAMS FAMILY: More Mediocre Than Macabre

Book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice; music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; based on characters created by Charles Addams; set and costume design, Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott; lighting design, Natasha Katz; sound design, ACME Sound Partners; puppetry, Basil Twist; hair design, Tom Watson; make-up design, Angelina Avallone; special effects, Gregory Meeh; orchestrations, Larry Hochman; music director, Valerie Gebert; choreography, Sergio Trujillo; original direction, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch; entire production under the supervision of Jerry Zaks

Cast:
Gomez Addams, Douglas Sills; Morticia Addams, Sara Gettelfinger; Uncle Fester, Blake Hammond; Grandma, Pippa Pearthree; Wednesday Addams, Cortney Wolfson; Pugsley Addams, Patrick D. Kennedy; Lurch, Tom Corbeil; Mal Beineke, Martin Vidnovic; Alice Beineke, Crista Moore; Lucas Beineke, Brian Justin Crum; the Addams Ancestors: Ted Ely, Karla Puno Garcia, Steve Geary, Patrick Oliver Jones, Lizzie Klemperer, Christy Morton, Rebecca Riker, Roland Rusinek, Geo Seery, Samantha Shafer

Performances:
Now through February 19, Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre, 270 Tremont Street, Boston. Tickets available at the Box Office, by calling 866-348-9738, or online at www.citicenter.org.

Creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, altogether ooky? Well, not so much in the national tour of The Addams Family musical currently haunting the Shubert Theatre in Boston courtesy of Broadway in Boston. This innocuous theme park reduction of Charles Addams’ famously quirky and darkly disquieting cartoon family works very hard to be all things to all people, but in so doing, it manages to be very little to no one in particular.

The hodgepodge score by Andrew Lippa and misguided book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice turn The Addams Family into nothing more than an old-fashioned (and rather bland) feel-good family musical with a storyline as twee as any Ozzie and Harriet sitcom from the 1950s. In this version, supposedly new and improved over the Broadway production which ended in December, Dear demented Wednesday (Cortney Wolfson) is all grown up now and very much in love – with a squeaky-clean all-American boyfriend named Lucas Beineke (Brian Justin Crum) whom she met while hunting in Central Park. As soon as you can say “duh duh duh dum snap snap,” they are engaged and want their families to meet.

Therein lies the crux of the conflict – or at least should. In Charles Addams’ warped realm, his ghoulish clan would rally against the evil forces of the outside world and protect Wednesday from the lure of suburbanites from Ohio. Instead, the conflict here becomes one of marital discord between Gomez (Douglas Sills) and Morticia (Sara Gettelfinger). When Wednesday asks her intergenerational brood to “act normal” in order to impress the Beinekes, Gomez lies to his beloved about the true purpose of the gathering and, for the first time in their 25-year marriage, is relegated to the dog house.

Quite simply, this conceit is all wrong given the distinctly perverse source material. What makes The Addams Family of the comics so intriguing is that they see their own utterly bizarre activities of daily living as completely normal. They go about their lives without an ounce of self-awareness. To them, everyone else is weird. Their (excuse the pun) deadpan deliveries and deliciously unaffected sinister edges are what make them so outrageously funny. In making Gomez and Morticia’s clichéd squabble so patently mundane, they are robbed of their essential phantasmagoria and have nowhere outlandish to go.

Thus the morbid humor of Charles Addams’ twisted comics – which dared to expose the evil thoughts that civilized people sometimes think but dare not express – gives way to cheap and predictable vaudeville. The score is an ineffectual mash-up of generic pop, variety show tunes, and Latin-inflected dance numbers. The meandering book is so laden with corny, old-timey burlesque jokes that even Sid Caesar would have had trouble landing them. The Addams Family, then, with all its potential for scathing insights and barbed-wire wit, becomes nothing more than a series of silly, harmless comedy bits. There are some entertaining moments, thanks primarily to a very talented cast, but the work as a whole never coalesces into what could have been refreshingly and grotesquely grand. No danger lurks in any corner of this production. The tedium at times is torturous – and not in the good way that masochistic young Pugsley (Patrick D. Kennedy) experiences with such excruciating joy.

The uniformly strong cast is led by the dashing Douglas Sills as Gomez. Sills pours every ounce of charisma he has into his beleaguered patriarch and mugs shamelessly, milking trite jokes dry and squeezing out laughs where none have any right to exist. At times, though, he seems to be fighting too hard to overcome the material. His character therefore suffers a bit as he tries gamely to pump life into a corpse. Co-star Sara Gettelfinger is suitably svelte and sexy as the inscrutable Morticia, although one can’t help but worry about a wardrobe malfunction given the deeply plunging neckline on her form-fitting funereal black dress. Gettelfinger’s easy comic delivery is a welcome relief from all the frenzied antics swirling around her, and she has a gentle maternal warmth that shines through her cool exterior. What’s missing is an ethereal grace and otherworldly essence. She strides rather than floats, assaying an all too contemporary everywoman who doesn’t mesh with the ensemble of time-traveling ghostly ancestors.

Cortney Wolfson as Wednesday, too, seems more a product of the American Idol era than of the gothic lineage from which she draws her warped penchant for a cross bow. She and Brian Justin Crumb as Lukas belt out their pop ballads powerfully and they share some of the more surprising and humorous jokes in the libretto. But they look too much alike – she a well groomed punk rocker and he a refugee from a boy band – to be a convincing star-crossed Juliet and Romeo.

Patrick D. Kennedy as the aforementioned pain-loving Pugsley brings a wryly grim quality to his performance, and Piper Pearthree as Grandma scampers mischievously around the stage as if on wheelies. Tom Corbeil as Lurch is grossly underutilized until the grand finale, but Blake Hammond as the moon-loving Uncle Fester has many moments to shine. Serving as narrator and the philosophical center of the family, he turns a silly little musical ode to the moon into a delightful 1920s pastiche, complete with striped unitard bathing suit and beach ball.

Martin Vidnovic as Mal Beineke has little to do but look stern and uncomfortable, and Crista Moore as his stifled wife Alice cheerfully speaks her mind in rhyme. Her big breakout number in which she has a big breakdown, however, falls flat. In her defense, she’s not given any help by the banality of the song or the staging.

The touring sets by Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott are woefully lacking in style or substance. Painted backdrops offer no sense of evil lurking around the corner and diminish the larger-than-life eeriness of the family mansion. Proscenium curtains are tediously brought in and out to narrow the playing area, flattening countless scenes to two dimensions in the process. The one scene that does satisfy in mood and scale is that of Central Park late at night. A large, luminous full moon casts haunting shadows through the limbs of an imposing tree in the foreground. In the background the city lights of New York map a familiar skyline, looking cheerful and inviting in contrast. Most of the time Natasha Katz’s lighting is too bright to evoke many chills, but here the balance is just right.

Basil Twist’s puppetry is a welcome treat. He brings new meaning to the idea of monsters under the bed, and one wonders, “How’d he do that?” when a broom sweeps its way across the stage unassisted. Alas, Thing makes very few appearances, and when he does, it’s no mystery.

Although Jerry Zaks is credited as supervisor instead of director (he was brought in to doctor the show after its woeful preview period in Chicago), the stamp of his high-octane, low-brow shtick is everywhere. Vaudeville asides, double-takes, and broken fourth walls are rampant. The philosophy, apparently, is, when the material is weak, the energy had better be strong. Woefully that energy doesn’t translate consistently to inventive staging. Nor does it inspire creative dance. Sergio Trujillo’s repetitive choreography is perfunctory at best.

For a mildly nostalgic trip through a happily haunted mansion that has no more to offer than corny old-fashioned humor and an all too familiar storyline, The Addams Family musical may be the right ticket. For a ghoulishly gleeful thrill ride through Charles Addams’ topsy-turvy world of menace and the macabre, a revisit to the 1990s movie versions – or even the 1960s sitcom – may be more satisfying.

PHOTOS BY JEREMY DANIEL: The principal cast of The Addams Family; Brian Justin Crum as Lukas and Cortney Wolfson as Wednesday; Cortney Wolfson and Patrick D. Kennedy as Pugsley; Douglas Sills as Gomez and Sara Gettelfinger as Morticia; Blake Hammond as Uncle Fester; Crista Moore as Alice Beineke and company; the company of The Addams Family