The Addams Family

It started life as a cartoon strip in the New Yorker magazine in the late 1930s. It became a TV sitcom in the 1960s and then a hit film. So it was probably only a matter of time before The Addams Family took to the musical stage.

This is Rocky Horror country crossed with a dash of those Eastwick Witches, a ghoulish gallery of Goth oddballs living in a vast, if decrepit, mansion in the middle of New York’s Central Park (don’t ask) and perfectly happy with their dyspeptic view of the world until Gomez and Morticia’s daughter, Wednesday, falls in love with a regular Joe called Lucas (Oliver Ormson).

Love? The family is rocked to its very foundations at the prospect of so alien a concept. But the affair is advancing at such a rate that, as Gomez remarks, before much longer, Wednesday will have morphed into Thursday. OK, you could have seen that joke coming down the turnpike for a good 10 minutes or more but it made me laugh. As did plenty of the snappy one-liners dotted throughout the evening, many of them jokes inserted for the benefit of older members of the audience.

The central conceit pivots on whether Lucas’s super-straight parents, Mal and Alice (Dale Rapley and Charlotte Page aka Mrs Alistair McGowan), will be able to survive the first make-or-break dinner party with their dotty opposite numbers. Oh, and also whether Wednesday (a terrific turn from carrie Hope Fletcher) can reconcile herself to life with so ‘normal’ a partner.

Her brother, Pugsley (excellent Grant McIntyre), is aghast at the idea of losing his sister. ‘Who will torture me after you’ve gone?’ he laments at one stage. No less horrified is Morticia (a fabulously silky, slinky Samantha Womack, late of Albert Square) who threatens husband Gomez (consistently funny and inventive Cameron Blakely) with the withdrawal of conjugal rights for sanctioning the youngsters’ union.

There is much incidental fun to be had out of Dickon Gough’s apparently eight-foot tall manservant, Lurch, and an entirely unrecognisable Les Dennis as creaky-voiced uncle Fester, looking for all the world like some disinterred, geriatric punk, who’s fallen in love with the Moon.

All right, the whole shebang is about as deep as a puddle but Andrew Lippa has written some hummable tunes with witty lyrics, while Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s book rarely loses its crackle. On a soggy Wednesday in Wimbledon, ahead of an extensive UK tour, it cheered me up considerably. And that’s not to be sneezed at.

For details of the tour, visit: www.theaddamsfamily.co.uk