![]() ![]() Ultimately, however, Addams’s poisoned brew is turned into Kool-Aid. ![]() The excellent, sweet-faced Kevin Chamberlin, a chubby Uncle Fester, also adds his palpable charm. As Grandma Addams, Jackie Hoffman looks like she stepped out of a Roz Chast cartoon, and she’s just as funny. With his energy and his voice pitched too high, he is irony’s emissary. Nathan Lane, with his hair slicked back like a riverboat gambler’s, does his best to keep the fun machine funny. The book, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, stays safely on the outside of Addams’s comic world, looking in. ![]() Zaks does his best to drive this money train down the bad track it’s laid on. But those snapshots were utterly subverted by making their happy home a haunted one. The family members in Charles Addams’s cartoons believed that they were normal, but from the first beats of this musical (under the creative direction of Jerry Zaks) the characters onstage know that they’re not: most of the evening is spent on endless illustration of the family’s evident pathological characteristics. Beginning in 1938, Addams’s original cartoons were snapshots of the traditional American family. ![]()
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