Rob Hubbard

Director Steve Edlund keeps the pace snappy and the energy vibrant throughout the show’s two-hour-and-40-minute running time. And the performers are invariably impressive, especially when avidly embracing the absurdity of such dance numbers as all the internet cooks coming to life in one kitchen, a nightmare sequence full of Riverdancing Mrs. Doubtfires or a climactic flamenco conflagration. Yet the ballads are also strong, conveying palpable sorrow as the family members figure up their losses.

Director Jessica Stone has given the show a briskly engaging pace that slows enough to let its deepest emotions resonate. Skillfully carrying the tale as Kimberly is Ann Morrison, marvelously placing the qualities of a bubbly when not sulky teen in the voice and body of an older woman.

Lloyd Webber’s score is passionately delivered by a cast of 38 and a 14-piece orchestra, and the leads boast particularly strong voices as they tenderly caress the ballads and lend admirable classical technique to the more operatic fare.

Characters can only get you so far without a story, and this plot is particularly conventional. Oldest child Wednesday is now an adult, one secretly engaged to a “normal” young man from Ohio, and she’s invited his parents to dinner to meet her decidedly out-of-the-ordinary family. That’s the gist of it, the action hanging on the flimsy premise that father Gomez keeping their engagement a secret will somehow damage his marriage to Morticia.

They spearhead a marvelously memorable waltz about the pub, “Gaston,” only to have it eclipsed back at the castle by an almost overwhelmingly entertaining “Be Our Guest.” For that, choreographer West and the cast employ one impeccably executed vintage dance device after another, from the can-can to kaleidoscopic, Busby Berkeley-style aerial views, concluding in a virtually full-cast tap extravaganza and, on Wednesday night, a partial mid-show standing ovation.

And what a rare pleasure it is to experience a new stage musical that’s so unabashedly eccentric and unpredictable. What at first looks as if it’s going to take us down the well-trod path of life in an American high school veers off into one wild detour after another. And, thanks to Lindsay-Abaire’s well-sculpted, trope-defying characters, it’s a very funny and richly satisfying show.

To call what a breathtakingly graceful and athletic cast offers onstage at the Orpheum ‘puppetry’ is to understate its power. The whole production feels as much a dance work as a play, the settings transforming before your eyes as the story unspools without interruption (save an intermission that comes with a gasp-inducing adrenaline rush)

It feels like that’s what playwright Sandy Rustin and director Casey Hushion were shooting for with “Clue,” a stage comedy built from a board game and a 1985 film fashioned after it. Currently opening a 21-city tour at Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre, its key ingredients are pace and outrageousness. And, if you’re in the right mood, you could have some fun with it, for it’s as much of a spoof of the game as it is an homage to it.

While “Broadway” is often invoked in the promotional materials for shows putting down stakes at St. Paul’s Ordway Center and Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre, those productions don’t customarily come directly from New York’s Great White Way. More often, they’re built exclusively for the road. Such is not the case with Roundabout Theatre Company’s staging of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer-winning drama, “A Soldier’s Play.” It won the 2020 Tony Award for “Best Revival of a Play”