The Addams Family

Illustration: Charles Addams

WHAT The Addams Family, a Broadway-bound new musical based on Charles Addams’s cartoons
WHEN Nov 13–Jan 10, 2010
WHERE Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre, 24 W Randolph St (312-902-1400, broadwayinchicago.com)

They’ve made sets out of Scotch tape (70 Hill Lane) and newspaper (Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha), and they’ve even made scenes look like a Grand Guignol pop-up book (Shockheaded Peter). So what will Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott, the founders of London’s Improbable theater company, whip up with a Broadway-size budget as codirectors and codesigners on The Addams Family?

Based on Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons, the new musical opening at the Oriental Theatre in November features a starry cast (Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth, Jackie Hoffman). But Crouch notes that a known property like Addams comes with certain expectations. The creative team is working from Addams’s cartoons, but “people in the audience have different ideas, depending on what age they are, of who the Addams family are,” he says.

“Some people don’t know they were cartoons; some people think it was [just] a film, some people think of the TV series. You want to satisfy all those different ideas.”

In preliminary discussions with writers Marshall Brickman, Rick Elice and Andrew Lippa, Crouch and McDermott decided Uncle Fester was their way into the show. “We asked to earmark Uncle Fester for ourselves,” Crouch says, “to have him be a bit like a master of ceremonies or a stage manager.… We decided he’d have a nostalgic view of a Broadway show, something from the 1920s or earlier—a little vaudeville, a little burlesque and tattered around the edges.”

The Addams house will be a central feature. “It’s a very derelict place with these extreme, diagonal shafts of light coming in,” Crouch says. “I became interested in the cracks in the walls, and the shutters, which seem to be Charles Addams’s main ingredient. He used them a lot, and we’ve turned them into a kind of motif.”

Puppetry, a staple of Crouch and McDermott’s work, will have a large presence in the show: The two are working with Obie-winning New York puppeteer Basil Twist on designs. “We’re trying to animate lots of things around the house,” Crouch says. “The Addams Family obviously lends itself to some certain treats.”

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