The Addams Family

The Addams Family opens with Wednesday Addams in love with a young man from an entirely ordinary family, and a dinner arranged so that both sets of parents can meet. Everything the Addamses find comfortable, the visitors find alarming, and nobody has agreed in advance what is going to count as normal.

Wednesday makes her father promise to keep the engagement from her mother, and the secret sits in the middle of the evening like an unexploded shell. Gomez is caught between the two women he loves, Morticia can tell she is being managed, and the guests are drawn into a family game that obliges everybody at the table to tell the truth. What follows is a comedy about how hard it is to pretend to be someone else for a whole evening.

Andrew Lippa wrote the music and lyrics, with a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, working from the characters the cartoonist Charles Addams drew for magazine readers from the 1930s onwards. The show reached its first full production in 2010 and has since been staged very widely by professional and amateur companies alike.

The score is broad and tuneful, with a strong tango streak for Gomez and Morticia, and the humour runs from the genuinely macabre to the frankly silly. Underneath the gags sits a warm argument about family: that the strange ones love each other exactly as hard as everyone else, and that growing up means allowing your parents to be wrong about you.

It suits audiences of mixed ages who like their jokes with a little rot around the edges, and it lands best live, where deadpan timing and a laughing room feed each other.