It’s well over eighty years since Charles Addams began to draw a series of witty cartoons for the New Yorker that ghoulishly parodied American family values.  Since then his family of amiable freaks has come back to haunt us in a variety of media, including a TV series and a couple of hugely successful Hollywood movies, so I guess it had to happen sooner or later that The Addams Family would be reincarnated as a stage musical. Created by Jersey Boys writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice together with composer and lyricist Andrew Lippa, it premiered on Broadway in 2010 and ran for over 700 performances, garnering an impressive array of awards.

Directed by Matthew White, this touring version has some real strengths.  Bathed in sepulchral purple and green light, the magnificently gloomy, gothic set is far more substantial than that seen in most touring shows. Equally solid is Andrew Hilton’s eight-piece orchestra, producing a very satisfying full-blooded sound.  The music itself is never less than serviceable, and some of the numbers are pleasingly catchy. There are some good performances in the main roles too, especially from Cameron Blakely as Gomez, and Samantha Womack as his wife, Morticia. Blakely’s Gomez is a bundle of urgency and energy, desperate to keep in Morticia’s good books while hiding from her the dreadful secret that their daughter Wednesday has fallen in love with a ‘normal’ all-American boy, Lucas Beineke. Womack is a wonderfully slinky cat-like Morticia, keeping a watchful eye on her husband while dreaming of a holiday in Paris – to visit the sewers. Their Tango De Amor in Act II is a beautifully choreographed highlight. Clever use is made of the family’s ancestors, ghostly creatures who emerge from the walls of the family mansion to add colour and movement to the songs. All the cast sing well, though there are times when an imbalance in the sound means that some words are lost. One outstanding musical moment comes near the end of Act I, when repressed housewife Alice Beineke (Charlotte Page) downs a truth-revealing potion and reveals how frustrated she is with being a conventional wife and mother. Page has an impressively wide range of experience in opera, and it shows in her thrilling, impassioned delivery of her song, Waiting.

Utterly unrecognisable, and with a voice that sounds like he’s been gargling with iron filings, Les Dennis is the bald and bizarre Uncle Fester. He acts as a narrator throughout, and is the only member of the cast to address the audience directly. The most genuinely weird episode comes when Uncle Fester suddenly confesses that he is in love with the Moon. Weird, and utterly disconnected from the rest of the storyline, but strangely poignant.  Dennis’s singing of The Moon and Me is one of the most memorable sequences in the show.

So there is much to like in The Addams Family, yet there are also some problems.  The comedy is rather low-key, with relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. There are some good lines – I liked Morticia’s explanation of why her daughter cannot wed a Beineke: ‘We are who we are, and they are from Ohio’ – but such wit is lacking elsewhere. Wednesday’s relationship with Lucas (Oliver Ormson) never catches fire, not least because his role is merely sketched in. The boy-meets-ghoul plot is decidedly thin, with everything pretty much done and dusted by the interval. The crisis moments in the story are underplayed, and there is never any real sense of spine-tingling tension or peril. Well-designed and well-performed, The Addams Family offers family-friendly fun, but it’s an uneven show that is a little lacking in cohesion and bite.   ★★★☆☆    Mike Whitton   14^th June 2017