The Addams Family — Singing a different tune?
By Diane Snyder
What does being Addams-y mean? That’s a question the creative team behind the splashy Addams Family Broadway musical had to decide as they wrote—and rewrote—their show, based on the characters created by cartoonist Charles Addams and brought to life in the 1960s TV series, and 1990s feature films, and finally on Broadway in 2009.
To production supervisor Jerry Zaks, Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester and their relations aren’t so different from the rest of us; their weirdness is just more pronounced.
“What we did was to maintain the truthfulness of who the Addams family is in terms of their values, but create a story that would make it possible for the audience to relate to Morticia and Gomez,” says Zaks, who’s won four Tony® Awards over the course of his directorial career, for shows such as Six Degrees of Separation and a 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls.
Still, coming up with a plot and reasons for such established characters to sing for two-plus hours proved to be a long and exacting process. Not as bad as having your fingernails removed (which, for an Addams, might feel like deep tissue massage), but it took them a couple of, ahem, stabs at the material.
As a result, Gomez and Morticia are singing a different tune—or three—in the touring edition of The Addams Family, which is spending the latter half of June at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The Broadway version underwent a considerable face-lift after the creative team, including Zaks, composer-lyricist Andrew Lippa, book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, and choreographer Sergio Trujillo, convened to revise the show for the national tour. It meant not only adding to and subtracting from the score, but also adjusting the thrust of the narrative.
“It was a real challenge to take these known characters and throw them into a new story,” says Lippa, whose score was nominated for a Tony. “We were dealing with iconic characters that had, for lack of a better term, a playbook about them. People came in knowing these characters to some degree, and of course everybody knows them in a slightly different way.”
So the task at hand became finding a unified version of the show that the collaborators could get excited about.
“Everyone has their own definition of what the right tone for the show should be,” adds Zaks. “‘It’s gotta be more Addams-y.’ But the people who say that don’t know what they’re talking about. It sounds smart, but Charles Addams drew these wonderful cartoons which peppered so many editions of The New Yorker magazine and which always put a smile on people’s faces. They were funny, but the reason we smiled is because we identified with the Addams family; we identified with their dark side.”
He points to an Addams drawing of the clan enjoying the holidays together: “The family is on the roof at Christmas time, just about to pour what appears to be hot boiling oil on carolers. That just speaks for itself.”
Zaks joined the creative team of The Addams Family in December 2009, during the show’s pre-Broadway run in Chicago, as a creative consultant to directors Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch. McDermott and Crouch are the British duo who also designed the Addams’ odd, macabre onstage world. The musical opened on Broadway a few months later, with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwrith heading the cast, but garnered only two Tony nominations although it ran for nearly two years. Speaking at the Drama League Awards that year, Lane quipped, “It’s no secret that The Addams Family was not well received in certain circles, like the Earth.”
The original plot revolved around Addams daughter Wednesday who, having fallen for a seemingly “normal” young man, invites him and his parents over for dinner to meet her family, then begs said family to try to act normal for one night (i.e., not be themselves). The story, the creators came to realize, gave Gomez and Morticia precious little to do besides look on, banter and, occasionally, sing and dance.
“There was no significant conflict between our two lead characters,” says Zaks. “Because of that, they were relegated to basically facilitating and observing the evening.”
This time around, Wednesday is engaged to her beloved, Lucas Beineke, and persuades her father not to tell her mother until she’s ready to announce it. Problems arise when Morticia suspects he’s hiding something from her.
“The cornerstone of the Morticia-Gomez relationship, we decided, should be that they always tell each other the truth,” explains Zaks. “They’ve always fully disclosed everything that was going on. And this is the night when Gomez keeps a secret from his wife, and he agrees to [do so] because he’s crazy about his daughter.”
For Lippa, whose musical theatre scores include The Wild Party and the upcoming Big Fish (adapted from the novel and film), the revised plot was a turning point. “That was the first big change we made for the tour,” he says. “It’s our reason for all of the changes that followed. There are three new songs in the show and all of them have to do with that conflict.”
Of those songs—“Trapped,” “Secrets” and “Not Today”—Lippa reports that the first one, a song that Gomez sings near the beginning of the show, was the hardest to write. It comes as Gomez realizes he’s torn between a promise he’s made to his wife and another he’s made to his daughter.
“It was grounded in the reality of what has made Gomez so frustrated and worried, but at the same time it had to be funny,” explains Lippa. “But he doesn’t realize it’s funny, he’s just stating the truth of it, and that took me a little while to grab on to. I wanted it to be funny, so I needed to come up with examples of people that were trapped in real life. There’s a lyric that goes, ‘Like a fly in my tea/Or the New York DMV/I’m trapped.’ Somehow people out in the country understand ‘New York DMV’ as being funny. They’ve never had an experience with it, but evidently they can imagine how bad it is.”
Three songs from the Broadway version were cut, including a Gomez and Morticia duet, “Where Did We Go Wrong”; Gomez’s love ode, “Morticia”; and “In the Arms,” a ballad sung by Lucas’ father after a rather affectionate encounter with a large mollusk. But Lippa didn’t mourn their demise.
“All the songs that got cut were songs that were tangential to the story as we were now writing it,” he says. “I was happy to lose them, actually. I’ve never had a show where there was a major song that I couldn’t bear to lose, and that’s usually because when you write that song that you can’t bear to lose, you wouldn’t need to, because it’s so clearly related to the story or to the characters in some way.”
The version now on tour is the one that will be licensed to school and regional theatres in the future, and both Zaks and Lippa says the final product was worth the effort it took to revise it. “It was a remarkable opportunity to go back and rethink the show,” explains Lippa. “Now in 20 years, when I go to my great nephew’s production of it at his high school, I can see a show that I really love.”
The Addams Family plays Denver’s Buell Theatre June 19-July 1, 2012. Tickets: 303.893.4100 or www.denvercenter.org.
Republished from Applause magazine. Written by DianeSnyder, a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Time Out New York, The Wall Street Journal and American Theatre.
Chas Addams: The Man Behind the Family
The musical The Addams Family is inspired by the creations of the legendary American cartoonist Charles Addams, who lived from 1912 until 1988. In 1933, when he was just 21, his work was published in The New Yorker, and over the course of nearly six decades, he became one of the magazine’s most cherished contributors.
Bizarre, macabre and weird are all words that have been used to describe Charles Addams’ cartoons. Yet adjectives such as charming, enchanting and tender can just as accurately be employed to depict the same body of work, as well as the man himself. His unique style and wonderfully crafted cartoons enabled his work to transcend such dichotomies for his millions of fans worldwide.
Charles Addams is most widely known for his characters that came to be called The Addams Family, a group that evolved into multiple television shows, motion pictures and now this Broadway musical. Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandma and Lurch existed in various forms and aspects of Addams’ cartoons dating back to the 1930s but were not actually named by him until the early 1960s, when the television series was created. Surprisingly, The Addams Family characters appear in only a small number of the artist’s several thousand works. The majority of his cartoons are occupied by hundreds of other characters, but there is little doubt that those that come to life on this stage are his most beloved creations.
Over 15 books of his drawings have been published around the world, including the new collection, The Addams Family: An Evilution, the first complete history of The Addams Family, including more than 200 cartoons, many never previously published. The collection also includes Addams’ own incisive character descriptions (originally penned for the benefit of the television show producers) that remind us where these oddly lovable characters came from and, in doing so, offer a lasting tribute to one of America’s greatest humorists.
THE ADDAMS FAMILY plays Denver’s Buell Theatre June 19-July 1, 2012. Tickets: 303-893-4100
WEST SIDE STORY: The Making of a Classic
It was September 26, 1957, and something great was coming that evening: a Broadway musical unlike any that had come before. “I thought West Side Story was going to be a flop,” says Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of the new show. “I thought maybe it would run for three months. I didn’t care. It was so not what a musical should be.”
That was evident to audiences from the outset. West Side Story opened not with a song, not with a book scene, but with a thrilling danced “Prologue.” But this was not dance for dancing’s sake, not a lavish, showy production number designed to get the audience into an upbeat mood. The number featured two rival gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, conveying their hatred toward one another through movement.
The “Prologue” remains one of the most impressive, expressive starts to any musical. But it is probably impossible for modern audiences to understand just how startling and original that number, like the rest of West Side Story, was 50-plus years ago. For generations that have grown up on Company, Follies, A Chorus Line, Sweeney Todd, Dreamgirls, Rent, and Movin’ Out, there is nothing particularly surprising about a musical that tells much of its story through dance; a musical that integrates song, dance, drama and design into a seamless, cohesive whole; a musical without a conventional chorus; a musical in which two of the leading characters lie dead onstage at the end of the first act; a musical without an upbeat ending. But these were bold, revolutionary choices by Laurents, director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, when West Side Story premiered.
“Steve and I have always differed about what’s special about West Side Story,” says Laurents. “He says it’s the style. I think what’s different is it’s the first musical that showed anything can be a musical. We have death, we have murder, we have attempted rape, we have bigotry. None of that was in musicals. But they’re in this musical because that’s what the story is.”
Actually, both Sondheim and Laurents are correct: the show was different in both style and content. Together with Bernstein and Robbins, they pushed the boundaries of the Broadway musical, and in so doing, redefined an art form. The current production, directed and reconsidered by Laurents, provides audiences with an opportunity to discover – or rediscover – what all the excitement was about.
The seeds for West Side Story were sown in 1949 when Robbins became intrigued with the notion of updating and musicalizing Romeo and Juliet. He contacted Bernstein and Laurents, and told them of his idea for a show about a pair of star-crossed lovers doomed by the enmity between their people. The girl was to be Jewish, the boy Catholic, and the setting would be the East Side of Manhattan during Easter and Passover. Bernstein often said that the idea intrigued him; Laurents has long said that the idea did not interest him because it reminded him of Abie’s Irish Rose, a popular 1922 light comedy with a similar interfaith theme.
Several years later, Bernstein and Laurents ran into each other at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, when they noticed a newspaper headline about Los Angeles gang fights between Mexicans and what Bernstein referred to as “self-styled” Americans. Similar hostilities were being played out on the streets of New York, including the West Side of Manhattan. It occurred to them that the clash of cultures between Puerto Ricans and “white” boys would provide more substantial subject matter for a modern-day Romeo and Juliet musical than Robbins’ earlier idea. When they contacted Robbins, he eagerly agreed.
Bernstein had originally intended to write the lyrics himself, but he soon realized that it wasn’t feasible. The artistic team then contacted Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were out in Hollywood working on a movie musical and unavailable. Sondheim, who had yet to break through on Broadway, was the next choice, but he didn’t want the job. He was trying to establish himself as a composer, and was fearful of being pigeonholed solely as a lyricist if he took West Side Story. But Oscar Hammerstein II, his mentor, convinced the reluctant Sondheim that working with three distinguished talents would be an invaluable experience.
Laurents was already a successful playwright and screenwriter, but this was his first time working on a musical. “When I was a kid, there was a stock company near where we lived in Brooklyn and my cousins and I would go on Saturday afternoons,” he says. “I remember seeing No, No, Nanette, and I thought it was so exciting. I’ve always had a love for musicals, and I wanted to do one.”
The book he wrote is among the shortest – if not the shortest – ever written for Broadway. “I wrote for radio, and when you write for radio, you really learn economy,” he says. In West Side Story, the narrative is conveyed mostly through music and movement. But Laurents’ prose is the glue that holds all the elements together and the springboard for the poetry of Robbins, Bernstein, and Sondheim.
Given the harrowing nature of the show, its bleak depiction of urban life, it is not surprising that West Side Story was deemed a huge commercial risk. Numerous producers spurned the project until Cheryl Crawford and Roger L. Stevens got behind it. Six weeks before rehearsals were to begin, Crawford organized a backers audition to raise money for the show. “It was at an apartment on the East Side,” says Laurents. “There was no air conditioning, and you could hear the tugboats. She didn’t raise one penny.” A few days later, she pulled out. “Except for Roger, everybody thought the show was terrible. In fact, Roger had a great friend who owned a Broadway theater. And he said, ‘I’m not giving that theater to any opera.’” In the end, Harold Prince, who had originally turned down the show, took on the project along with his partner, Robert E. Griffith, in arrangement with Stevens.
Rehearsals of West Side Story were invigorating, inspiring, and emotionally draining. Robbins was known as a perfectionist and a taskmaster, and he goaded, cajoled and browbeat the cast until he got what he was after. He wanted the actors to look like real people dancing, as opposed to dancers playing real people. He strove for a sense of naturalism, not only in the acting but in the choreography.
West Side Story was the first musical propelled by dance, by choreography that moved the plot forward and conveyed emotions that the Jets and Sharks were incapable of verbalizing. It was the first show in which every member of the chorus had a name and a clearly defined character, the first musical in which every chorus person was an individual. Robbins saw to it that each actor created a history for his or her character. He also gave the cast a great deal of material to work with. Part of the show’s authenticity stemmed from the fact that he spent time observing gang members in Spanish Harlem and Greenwich Village. He befriended some of the captains of the gangs, and some social workers. He read anything he could find about gang warfare, and posted articles on the subject all over the walls of the rehearsal studio, so that the cast would better understand what these groups were fighting about. Robbins also insisted that the actors playing the Jets and the Sharks be kept apart during rehearsals. He got the results he was after: members within a “gang” bonded with each other, and became somewhat alienated from the actors in the rival gang. Those feelings helped fuel their performances.
Robbins created a dance language unique to the show: much of the choreography is based more on street movement than on familiar dance steps, and there was a reason or emotion behind every movement, every gesture. And Laurents invented words and phrases for the gangs as a way of indicating their inarticulateness and as a substitute for four-letter words, which simply weren’t spoken onstage back then. “I don’t even think the audience is aware of it,” he says.
The premiere of West Side Story was generally well-received, although some critics respected the show more than they enjoyed it. The original production ran for 21 months, went out on tour, then returned to Broadway for an additional seven and a half months; in all, a decent, unexceptional run. But the show has had a remarkable afterlife. The 1961 movie – which Laurents dislikes – was a critical and commercial success, the recipient of 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film also brought widespread popularity to the score: the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack was No. 1 on Billboard’s album charts for an astonishing 54 weeks.
Over the years, the show has taken on legendary status, as it has influenced generations of choreographers, directors, composers, and lyricists to dare to be different. That was a byproduct, not the intention, of Laurents, Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins. “If you’re going to tell a story with any degree of truth, you’ve got to go where the story takes you,” says Laurents. “And this is where the story took us. We weren’t thinking about changing anything. We just wanted to be good.”
