by RICK DANLEY // October 6, 2016
The Addams Family is so firmly wedged in the popular imagination that, during the 2004 presidential election, the then-editor of the New York Times referred to John Kerry as having an “Addams Family face.” It was an unkind statement, and yet everybody knew what he meant. (In case they didn’t, he went on to say of Kerry’s upper-crust stiffness: “It’s as if Lurch had gone to Choate.”)
But before being turned into popular television, the Addamses — Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley and, of course, the alopecic Uncle Fester — appeared as casual fodder for the reader of the New Yorker magazine, who encountered the gloomy brood for the first time in a series of single-panel cartoons beginning in 1938.
Seventy-plus years later, a group of producers aiming to restore the delightful darkness of Charles Addams’s original drawings — whose transgressive edges had been thoroughly smoothed for a TV audience — created “Addams Family,” the musical, which proved an instant audience favorite on Broadway in 2010, and which has continued to fly its popular freak flag in the many cities around the world where it’s still performed.
Beginning tonight at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center, the musical will get a ghoulishly good airing from Allen Community College’s theatre department, under the direction of Tony Piazza.
THE MUSICAL’S plot is a recognizable one: Girl falls for boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Except, in this version, given the deliciously off-center moral universe in which the Addamses exist, the familiar story revolves in the opposite direction.
To the enormous horror of her darkly eccentric family, Wednesday Addams (Catherine Huskey) falls in love with Lucas, a “normal” boy from a safe, starchy family back in Ohio (“A swing state!” protests Gomez, whose family manse sits proudly in the center of New York City.)
Gomez and Morticia are stiff with grief at the thought that they might lose their crossbow-toting Gothic daughter to the boring conventions of bourgeois life. And Pugsley, the gleefully masochistic younger brother, worries: Who will torture me if Wednesday leaves?
Subplots abound: Gomez and Morticia’s long-term romance is tested in the crisis — but, like most everything else in this happy-ending musical, it finds its fix in a tableau of teasing reconciliation, which concludes with a bout of very sexy make-up dancing. Uncle Fester, the unlikely moral conscience of the musical, falls truly, madly, deeply in love with the moon. And the normal Beinekes from Ohio are, you guessed it, not as normal as polite appearance might first imply. And then there’s the Addams grandmother, played with watchable loopiness by Ashley Holloran, who stalks the margins of the plot, a lovable agent of potential chaos.
And then, of course, there is Lurch, the Frankensteinian manservant, who is played with perfect mental vacancy and precise physical timing by the gifted Judd Wiltse.
ACC will have to contemplate its loss when sophomore Emily Pierce graduates. A consistently strong female lead in a number of prior ACC productions, Pierce can do most anything on stage.
Here, Pierce manages a skintight onyx dress and glossy black wig in her role as Morticia, queen of the withering stare and the deadpan insult.
Gomez is played with unctuous charm by Aaron Huskey. Chad Betts provides a lovable turn as Fester. Brogan Falls finds the essentially lonely appeal of Pugsley. Lucas, the vanilla-flavored love object of Wednesday’s obsession, is played with skittish energy and believable innocence by the skilled Nicholas Watson. Ian Malcolm, as Mal Beineke, performs the most spastic, double-jointed, terrifying, impromptu dance number that has probably ever rattled the boards at the Bowlus. And his wife, Alice Beineke, played by songbird Katharine Terhune, delivers a truly incredible face plant into a table full of dishes, signaling the first fissure in the Beineke’s bland facade.
THE MOST obvious theme of the musical — love conquers all — is abetted by a more submerged, but probably more interesting, message: Where the pressures of society run so heavily in the direction of conformity — as they do in small-town Ohio, for instance (or, say, Kansas) — the family, the domestic castle, is still the safest place to cultivate your special weirdness.
A perfect indoor compliment to the weekend’s Farm-City Days activities, “The Addams Family” runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Bowlus. Curtains go up at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for children.
