New York

If you're a New Yorker with children, or if you're bringing the family to Manhattan this summer, you'll have to go to "The Addams Family." It won't kill you. You'll laugh a lot, though never during the unmemorable songs, which are supposed to be funny but aren't. You're more than likely to spend a considerable part of the evening wondering how much the set cost. And as you depart the theater, you'll probably catch yourself wondering whether it was really, truly worth it to take your kids to a goodish musical whose tickets are so expensive that you can buy an iPad for less than the price of four orchestra seats.

Anyone who wants to understand how Broadway works need only reflect upon the curious history of "The Addams Family." It started out as a more or less serious attempt by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the creators of "Shockheaded Peter," to put together a musical based not on the 1964 TV sitcom or the films of 1991 and 1993, but on the deliriously macabre, exquisitely well-drawn cartoons that Charles Addams contributed to The New Yorker from 1938 until his death a half-century later. That, at any rate, was the version of "The Addams Family" that opened last December in Chicago, where it died the death of a thousand critical cuts (though the public flocked to see it) and was subsequently subjected to ruthless show-doctoring by Jerry Zaks, a director whose track record reveals him to be a devout believer in the gospel of obviousness. New songs were written by Andrew Lippa, new jokes penned by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, and now a newer, safer "Addams Family" has opened on Broadway, where it will undoubtedly run until I'm older and grayer.

Such are the ways of big-budget franchise theater, in which the goal is to give the public what it already knows it wants. That's what "The Addams Family" does. If you liked the sitcom and/or the movies, you'll know just what you're going to get, right down to the ba-da-da-DUMP (snap, snap) TV-show themelet with which Mr. Lippa's otherwise anonymous-sounding score begins. The plot, in which young Wednesday Addams (Krysta Rodriguez) falls for a noncreepy boy from Ohio (Wesley Taylor), is as bland as canned tomato soup, and Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth play Gomez and Morticia Addams right down the center (he's zany, she's haughty).

Everett Collection


Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 W. 46th St.

So what's good about "The Addams Family"? Ms. Neuwirth, for openers, whose cool, leggy hauteur is impossible to resist. Mr. Lane works hard all night long (you can see him sweating), almost always to good effect. The fantastically elaborate set, designed by Messrs. McDermott and Crouch, evokes with gratifying exactitude the eerie parallel universe of the Addams cartoons. The dialogue scenes, though at all times rigidly predictable, are often quite funny. And Basil Twist, America's most creative puppeteer, has staged a black-magic flying scene for Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlin) that is downright poetic.

What's not so good? Mainly Mr. Lippa's songs, which are unamusingly jokey ("You have to see the world in shades of gray / You have to put some poison in your day") and tuneless to boot. Every time one of the characters starts singing, "The Addams Family" throttles down to a crawl. Since the musical numbers take up roughly half of the show's running time, this is—to put it mildly—a major problem, one that Sergio Trujillo's anodyne choreography for a chorus line of corpses does nothing to solve. And I, for one, wish that something surprising had happened in the course of the evening.

Just to make sure that I wasn't missing the point, I brought along my 13-year-old nephew, Ian. He gave "The Addams Family" "a thumb-and-a-half up," praising the jokes and special effects as "really cool" but complaining that the action slowed down too much during the songs. Except for that last half-thumb, I'm with him.

Joan Marus


Music Box Theatre,
239 W. 45th St.


Ken Ludwig writes comfy, low-stakes farces in which no one is embarrassed—at least not for long—and all of the characters live happily ever after. "Lend Me a Tenor," last seen on Broadway in 1990, is the quintessential example of Mr. Ludwig's easygoing comic approach, a farce about a production of Verdi's "Otello" whose star (here played by Anthony LaPaglia) fails to show up for opening night. The plot is properly labyrinthine, the jokes reasonably clever, but never once do you thrill with sadistic glee as a pompous twit strolls heedlessly toward his well-deserved rendezvous with humiliation. If that's what you expect from a farce—and I do—you'll find "Lend Me a Tenor" to be amiable but more then a few teeth short. If not, you'll like it just fine.

Stanley Tucci is making his Broadway debut as a stage director with this revival. His inexperience shows: The staging, for all its coarsely slapsticky liveliness, isn't as taut as it ought to be, and there are spots where the momentum flags noticeably. The solid cast is led by Tony Shalhoub, lately of "Monk," whose presence is drawing large and enthusiastic crowds. His comic acting is generally satisfactory, if not always dynamic enough. Jan Maxwell, who plays Mr. LaPaglia's long-suffering wife, is the real star of the show—you can feel the energy level soar every time she walks on stage—and John Lee Beatty's six-door set is gloriously farce-friendly.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at