The Wisconsin Premiere of The Addams Family Musical is a sparklingly sharp and intimate evening of musical theater. Theatre Unchained manages to pack quite a lot of production into its tiny space with the darkly comedic musical theatre tribute to a group of characters that originated as a New Yorker comics series, moved to TV and made a hit in Hollywood in the 1990s before the musical debuted onstage in 2009.
There's a full cast. The whole family is represented here. In and amidst flashes of brilliance from various ends of the ensemble, we see the most striking depth in the renderings of husband and wife Gomez and Morticia. The matriarch and patriarch of the iconoclastically dark and comically twisted family are charismatically brought to the stage by a couple of people I don’t remember ever seeing onstage before.
Timothy J. Barnes plays Gomez as a suave, Latin man of grace and poise. His perfection is put to the test when his morbid little daughter tells him that she is in love with a boy. Barnes delivers a kind of classy confidence which is crisply thrown into motion and turmoil by the events of the play. The character’s own emotional bewilderment is fun to watch in contrast to his irrepressible unflappability. Barnes juggles things very swiftly in a deeply enjoyable performance.
Kassandra Novell plays his wife Morticia with a magnetic maternal sensuality. The script gives the actress playing Morticia quite a lot of dichotomy to tango with. She has to express parental concern with her children while speaking dialogue that tenderly opposes gentleness in some very, very brutal ways. She must seem very wicked and sinister, but in a way that is sweet, lovely and at the same time exciting and seductive. Novell does a brilliant job with all of this while delivering a remarkably elegant hold on the delicate balance of humor present in the script. All of this quite seamlessly and meticulously balanced by Novell in her performance of Just Around the Corner. It’s a cheerful celebration of the fact that death can happen at any moment. It’s both overwhelmingly morbid and brilliantly cheerful. Novell delivers it dazzlingly.
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It’s sad that more of the musical doesn’t aspire to the kind of weird dichotomy found in Just Around the Corner. So much of it is fashioned around a more obvious and less sinister kind of musical theatre sentiment. The single biggest reaction from the audience to a musical number was when Bryanna Van Caster sang Waiting. She’s playing the mother of the son that the Addams daughter is in love with. As things begin, Van Caster is playing the popular stereotype of the sweetly cheesy midwestern mom. In Waiting she’s allowed to finally confront her husband with the quiet desperation in her life. It’s a very explosively passionate performance that Van Caster executes with some really impressive vocals. but it lacks the subtlety and nuance that inhabit the musical’s best moments.
There’s a very tiny fragment of a moment in the show that characterizes what I absolutely love about this musical. At one point, Van Caster’s character is looking for a restroom and asks Gomez if there’s “a little girl’s room.” The punchline is one of the most subtly disgusting and overwhelmingly disturbing things I can ever remember laughing at. Blink and you’ll miss it, but if you think about it for even a few seconds it’s really, really creepy. I was both repulsed and amused in equal parts at the same time. You find very few musicals that are quite that pleasantly disorienting. It’s too bad that the musical as a whole doesn’t lean more in the direction of that type of joke and the complexity of Just Around the Corner. The schmaltzy more traditional American musical sentiment becomes kind of overwhelming in the end, but thankfully Theatre Unchained carries it across with enough idiosyncratic wit to make this a really, really satisfying trip to the theatre.
The sentimentality is at its best in the performance of Marty Graffenius in the role of Fester. The character comes to represent the emotional heart of the whole story. This is a tricky proposition for any actor in a show like this. There are a million ways that this could go wrong and about a quarter dozen where they might actually work. Graffenius nails the emotional heart of the musical perfectly. In a performance that feels rather uncannily like Jackie Coogan in the original TV series, Graffenius draws a profound amount of enchanted empathy out of the audience in the role of a man in love with the moon. It’s a deeply, deeply charming performance.
I would be remiss if I forgot to mention how beautiful this production is. Production Designer Jim Padovano and Costume Designer Sophia Jones deliver a visual reality for this story that’s gorgeous. I love the color pallet. It’s all black and white with little accents of red. There’s the occasional splash of alarming yellow to contrast against everything. The simplicity of that aesthetic makes quite an impact.
The Theatre Unchained staging of The Addams Family Musical runs through Sept. 28 on 1024 S. 5th St. For ticket reservations, call 414-391-7145 or visit theatreunchained.com.
