Much-improved 'Addams Family' returns to Chicago

The national tour of “The Addams Family” doesn't have the same star power that gave the musical so much buzz when Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth appeared in its troubled pre-Broadway engagement at Chicago's Oriental Theatre in 2009. But despite a less-starry cast, “The Addams Family” has become eminently more enjoyable to watch thanks to some canny post-Broadway script and score changes that are currently on display at Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre through Sunday, Jan. 1.

You have to hand it to the show's producers who gave composer/lyricist Andrew Lippa (“The Wild Party”) and book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (“Jersey Boys”) another chance to try and fix “The Addams Family” for its national tour after it received such a brutal critical reception on Broadway. The beloved and ghoulishly unconventional characters created by the late cartoonist Charles Addams (and later popularized in a 1960s sitcom) definitely deserved better. Now the creative team seem to finally hit upon a version that, if not fully perfect, definitely has more dramatic and comic plusses working in its favor.

Lippa has dropped and added songs, while the once sometimes aimless script now has a clearer focus, thanks to an added central dilemma for the amorous Spanish-accented father Gomez (a very dashing and funny Douglas Sills).

Like the previous edition, “The Addams Family” hinges on the grown-up Addams daughter Wednesday (a great gothic belter in Cortney Wolfson) and her engagement to an essentially “normal” guy named Lucas Beineke (a decent Brian Justin Crum). There is plenty of comic fallout when Lucas' conservative Ohio parents meet up with the spooky and kooky Addams brood, but now Gomez has to hide Wednesday's secret engagement from his wife, Morticia (a very curvaceous and delightfully deadpan Sara Gettelfinger), despite his promise to never withhold anything from her.

This plot twist rightfully helps put the focus back on the Addams, who all variously have their own concerns about what changes Wednesday's love interest will bring to the family dynamics. There's the underhanded plotting of brother Pugsley (Patrick D. Kennedy) who is worried that his sister won't torture him anymore, while Uncle Fester (a wonderfully eccentric Blake Hammond) calls upon the ghostly Addams Ancestors to stick around and aid the family in this trying time (a far better integration by production supervisor Jerry Zaks and choreographer Sergio Trujillo of the dancing chorus into the show).

Lippa's revised pop and Latin-influenced score is still lots of fun (with only Morticia's production number “Just Around the Corner” sticking out as a dramatically incongruous step), while Brickman's and Elice's change-of-heart transformation for the Beineke patriarch Mal (Martin Vidnovic) still seems rushed (even if it isn't as uncomfortable as before when it involved an amorous encounter with an oversize octopus).

Some who saw “The Addams Family” in Chicago might miss some of the dark whimsical visual touches that original directors and designers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch brought to the show, like the ingenious puppets of a carnivorous plant and the aforementioned octopus. Luckily there are still some wonderfully playful puppetry scenes involving a runaway tassel and the all-hair Cousin It, plus the utterly charming number of Uncle Fester's lunar courting in “The Moon and Me.”

Those who previously saw “The Addams Family” in Chicago will also note that some of the performances don't shine as brightly as their predecessors (namely Pippa Pearthree, who isn't a patch on Jackie Hoffman's feisty wild-card take on Grandma, or Victoria Huston-Elem's turn as the pleasantly rhyming Beineke mother Alice, who lacks a spark that Carolee Carmello brought to the role).

But what matters most is “The Addams Family” has gone through changes that make the show much improved. Now more than ever audiences will gladly heed the deep bass advice of Tom Corbeil's Frankenstein-like butler Lurch, who finally breaks free from his comic mumbling as he encourages everyone to “Move Toward the Darkness.”