Adam Riegler, Jackie Hoffman, Bebe Neuwirth, Nathan Lane,Kevin Chamberlin, Krysta Rodriguez and Zachary James
in The Addams Family.
By Hap Erstein
After another downpour Tuesday morning, the rains ended but it got even colder. Don’t the weather gods realize that it is almost May?
Nor did I have much luck with theater. I can be fairly Pollyanna-ish when it comes to refusing to believe the prevailing opinion about a bad show until I see for myself. And since Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth and Kevin Chamberlin seem so perfectly cast, how could their show be as disappointing as I have heard?
Oy. Of course, I am referring to The Addams Family, with Broadway’s reigning clown as Gomez Addams, the deadpan two-time Tony winner as his slinky wife Morticia and the very talented Chamberlin – who should have played Shrek, don’t you think? – as Uncle Fester.
But good as they are, they need material to play. Even though the script is written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, the guys who gave us the drumskin-tight book to Jersey Boys, they came up short here. As many have already observed, the plot of The Addams Family echoes that of La Cage aux Folles – a grown child is embarrassed by her parents’ unconventional lifestyle and demands they pretend to be more normal when her prospective in-laws come for a visit – but the show’s focus keeps shifting away from Gomez and Morticia, the only characters we really are interested in.
And Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party) seems the wrong choice to pen the score, since he is not inherently funny. Things do get a little better in the second act: Uncle Fester sings a love song to the moon that suggests the surreal quality of the show that might have been, and a vaudeville number for Lane, Chamberlin and Jackie Hoffman (as Grandma) is tasty, even if very reminiscent of the superior Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
The much-anticipated show has a sizeable advance sale and the audience seemed to have a good time, but there was too much talent involved for the results to be so wrong-headed.
I usually visit Broadway at this time of year, because of all the openings just before the Tonys deadline. In addition, this is the time of the Easter Bonnet Competition, which has nothing to do with Easter and everything to do with the end of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS’ fund-raising season.
Now in its 24th year, the Bonnet show has grown from a small event in the basement of the Palace Theatre to a two-day celebration on the stage of Minskoff Theatre (where The Lion King reigns) of the theater community’s work raising money for a great cause.
The show is a series of skits by the casts – OK, mostly chorus members and understudies – who wink at their own shows or kid other shows. Each skit then culminates with the arrival of an elaborate bonnet, usually the creation of the technical staff of each show.
This year, for instance, the target of many running jokes were the bloated, stalled Spiderman:The Musical and the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies. The winning bonnet came from the show Memphis, a hat festooned with sticks of dynamite, a follow-up to a skit of camo-clad soldiers in Iraq (I think), but the bonnet then exploded with colored streamers, revealing a “love” heart.
OK, you had to be there.
Even if this year’s Bonnet show was a little below par, it remains one of the most enjoyable events of the Broadway season, a rare glimpse at how performers spend their treasured off hours and a lot more entertaining than some of the hot-ticket Broadway productions (see The Addams Family above.)
Next: A Behanding in Spokane and Sondheim on Sondheim.