His influence is reflected not only in the work of generations of cartoonists but also in movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and those by Wes Craven, and television shows like “The Simpsons.” In those works, rather than coddle children, parents suggest that they turn on each other, as Morticia does in one cartoon when she tells Wednesday to stop “whining” about her maniacal brother and threaten to poison him back. The challenge is undoubtedly steep, given Addams’s ingenuity.
Kevin Miserocchi, the executive director of the foundation and one of its two trustees, said in an e-mail message. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The view is of a cemetery crowded with tombstones.Ī 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. 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.
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