UNIFESO 2011/1

Around 1938, the genial, suburban cartoonist Charles

Addams invented in these pages a ghoulish tribe of sadists

and malcontents, intended to tease the notion of American

prosperity and the cult of the perfect nuclear family. Into

[5]  innocent lives dedicated to the pursuit of happiness,

Addams´s creepy crew injected a dose of gleeful dread. His

  game was to turn values upside down: bad was good; ugly

was beautiful; freaky was normal; the deadly gave life. They

poured boiling oil on Christmas carollers, they asked their

[10]  neighbors for a cup of cyanide. By making darkness

delightful, Addams struck a lasting cultural chord; his

  macabre creation has been the basis of a television series, a

TV movie, two feature films, and two animated cartoons.

Now, not seven decades too soon, the musical theatre

[15]  has decided to exploit the brand as well - to pit the

aggressive power of Addams´s mischief against the bromidic

power of Broadway. In Addams´s cartoons, mordancy was

an authentic expression of aggression. In "The Addams

[20]    Family" musical, it´s merely a mannerism. Addams´s family

members believed that they were normal. That was the joke.

From the first beats of the musical, however, the characters

we see onstage know that they are not. Most of the evening is

spent on endless illustration of the family´s evident

pathological characteristics. This is vamping, not storytelling.

 [25]   Descriptive but not dramatic, the songs take neither the plot

nor the characters anywhere.

Luckily the excellent, sweet-faced Kevin Chamberlin, a

chubby Uncle Fester, adds his charm to the show. "Promises

broken. Marriages threatened. Delicious anarchy," Fester says

 [30]   to the audience at the beginning of of Act II, summing up the

story so far. " Can this be repaired? Or do we all leave in an

hour vaguely depressed? You know my answer. If "The

Addams Family" bears witness to anything , it´s to a peculiar

habit of most Broadway producers: give them a mile and

 [35]  they´ll take an inch.

(from FESTERING, by J. Lahr, in The new yorker, April 19,2010)