Who would have ever thought that a family who: lives in a mansion in Central Park, parties in a graveyard, and has house full of Spanish Inquisition-era torture devices would become the new definition of normal in musical theater? And yet that’s exactly what America’s most macabre family, The Addams Family, is doing during their month long run at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. While most tours tend to be second-rate versions of their Broadway predecessors, this production is just the opposite. Always the trendsetters, The Addams Family musical is a representation of shows who are correcting their flaws and hitting the road to prove that there is life beyond the “great white way.”
Broadway shows tend to live a cyclical life. They open in New York, followed by a national tour, a possible London production and then life in regional theater including high school productions. If a show is really good, a Broadway revival is usually waiting in the wings two decades after the original production. During this time, the show rarely changes form. What was on-stage in the original Broadway production is the show that goes on tour and licensed for community theater groups. Not the case though with The Addams Family.
The show opened on Broadway to negative reviews in April 2010. This followed a particularly turbulent pre-Broadway engagement in Chicago where numerous songs were cut, and a rumor started that the show was in trouble. Between Chicago and New York, the creative team went back to work, and while the show was better, The Addams Family just didn’t snap (insert your own Addams Family theme joke here!).
Despite the bad reviews, the show played on Broadway for a respectable 725 performances, earning back 70% of production costs. When a national tour was announced, everyone in the theater community thought it would be the same show that played New York. The producers had another idea. After watching the show for two years, they finally understood the main problem, and had an idea on how to fix it.
In the show, Wednesday Addams shocks her family by announcing her engagement. Even worse for the family is that her fiancé is normal. How normal? He’s from Ohio. The Broadway production tended to focus on Wednesday’s story; however the producers discovered that the audience cared more about her parent’s story, Gomez and Morticia adjusting to their daughter growing up. To fix this, the creative team rewrote several key scenes, cut several old songs and added three new songs. The result was a refocused plot, a tightened show and much better reviews on tour.
So why did the creative team do this? Simple, to enhance the show’s commercial value. Broadway musicals are expensive. They usually cost roughly $10-30 million dollars to produce and can take years to go from the page to the stage. That being said, when a production flops, it decreases a show’s potential earning ability on tour, and even to be licensed in regional theater. The Addams Family team knew they had a show with a recognizable commodity; it just needed to find its core.
While once rare, it’s becoming more common for shows to be improved before going on tour. Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose most recent show Lover Never Dies, the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera which famously flopped in London (more on that in an upcoming post), recently went to Australia to work on a revised version of the show. The result was a much improved show which was so successful Universal Pictures choose to film it and distribute world-wide on DVD.
I think more shows are going to follow this trend. The gestation period for a musical is so long, that a production really doesn’t have an excuse for failure. For audiences though, my hope is that this will only improve the quality of musicals. I for one, thoroughly enjoyed The Addams Family and have recommended it to everyone. Although I can’t be surprised that The Addams Family has started a new trend. As the clan famously sings during their opening number:
When you’re an Addams,
The standard answers don’t apply!
The Addams Family is at the Kennedy Center thru July 29th. To purchase tickets please visit: http://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=TMTSE
The Addams Family is also on tour. To see if it is playing in your town please visit: http://theaddamsfamilymusicaltour.com/
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