A sadder but wiser Addams Family

Photographs and Images by Charles Addams/Permission of Tee and Charles Addams Foundation; AP

Of course, since this is the Charles Addams universe, every time she sings “pulled” she pulls on a lever and starts torturing her younger brother Pugsley. (“He’s loving being tortured,” Lippa enthuses.) And the premise of the musical isn’t completely out of line with the earlier versions: it’s similar to an episode of the sitcom (and an Addams cartoon) in which Pugsley upsets the family by wanting to be a Boy Scout. But it’s still close to the formula of other big musicals, where characters have some sort of internal conflict at the beginning and learn to like themselves by the end. In other versions of this material, the Addamses don’t question themselves or their lifestyles; “they live in this bubble of a universe where everything is terrific,” Lippa says. In offering plot points like Morticia’s fears of growing older, the show is doing something that could seem un-Addamsy: letting them think, if only for a moment, that they might not be perfect. Some people who worked on the show thought all this introspection was making things too heavy: Neuwirth told New York magazine that in the tryouts, Morticia was “deeply unhappy from the middle of the first act through the end of the show,” and that she was hoping for “more wisecracks” as the creative team rewrote the script and songs. This family may live in a dark world, but this could be their first adaptation that isn’t basically lighthearted.

That may be unavoidable if the writers want to flesh the characters out for a full evening. The TV show only needed to come up with 24 minutes’ worth of story every week, and the features were episodic and patchy, but in a Broadway musical, Lippa explains, viewers expect “that in a story there’s going to be some conflict.” In a way, though, it’s just the logical culmination of one key fact about Addams’s creations: they may look and act strangely, but they’re basically a normal family that happens to have unusual tastes. Most of the cartoons and television episodes feature the characters doing familiar things and facing familiar problems. Jon Davis, who runs the unofficial Addams Family website at addamsfamily.com, says that the themes are usually “children, their behaviour, going to school, relatives coming to visit, familial misunderstandings and celebrations.” And though they act unconventionally, they’re not a dysfunctional family in any way. A famous cartoon shows the family gathered at the window, watching a storm outside; Gomez remarks that this is “just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive.” In what Lippa calls the “Addams inversion,” they enjoy the opposite of what we enjoy, but other than that, they’re a happy family that enjoys each other’s company. Addams created characters who are secretly conventional, and maybe even realistic: “Looking at the women in his life,” Davis explains, “they resembled Morticia, tall, black-haired and slender.”

Given how genuinely beloved these characters are, it may make sense for the musical to treat them like any other fictional family unit: people whose emotions and problems can be conveyed in song. Lippa points to a moment where Gomez is pushing Wednesday on a broom-shaped swing (a scene right out of the cartoons) and sings a song called Happy/Sad, in which he expresses mixed feelings about his daughter growing up. “I didn’t know I was going to go into the show writing a beautiful song from a father to his daughter.” Over 70 years after Charles Addams introduced us to the idea that a creepy family can be adorable, this is the next logical step: a Broadway show about a loving but old-fashioned family dealing with a changing world and their daughter’s changing values. That describes the Addams musical, but it also describes Fiddler on the Roof. Except that the family in Fiddler on the Roof doesn’t have a giant squid as a pet. Not yet, anyway.