09 April 2019

The Addams Family


Review by: Paul Towers, 09/04/19
The Addams Family by Marshall Brickman &  Richard Elice, music & lyrics by Andrew Lippa
A LOPS production
Leicester Little Theatre 9-13 April 2019

“spooky and macabre”

The Addams Family sprang from the feverish imagination of Charles Addams, a graphic artist in 1930’s New York. As a sideline to his main job of doctoring corpse pictures, he amused himself with suitably dark one-frame cartoons. Eventually they were collated into a book and published. One book was called  Addams and Evil and The Family was born.
In 1962 a TV producer saw the potential for the characters to become a sit com, albeit a bizarre one.. It took 2 years but eventually ABC in America broadcast it and it ran for 2 seasons spawning copies like The Munsters.
In the 90’s the brand was resurrected for a couple of feature films in 2007 and finally made it to Broadway in 2010 as a musical which toured in the UK from April to November 2017.
LOP’s amateur production includes all of the original characters, even Thing, the disembodied hand, makes a  cameo appearance on the interval animated backcloth.
Uncle Fester (Neil Prior doing a very credible impersonation of Christopher Lloyd) serves as narrator. Morticia (Alexandra Elliot) and Gomez Addams (David Lovell) are the proud parents of Wednesday (Danielle Cherise Smith) and Pugsley (Carla Smith cast trendily gender blind). Lucas Beineke (Matt Barton) is Wednesday’s fiancĂ©e.
The set is suitably spooky and the macabre costuming sets the mood .
An onstage orchestra is hidden behind a projection screen which, innovatedly for the Little Theatre, has animations for scene changes
The Addams Family is at The Little Theatre until Saturday 13th April

Leicester Little Theatre - https://www.thelittletheatre.net/
First published on Western Gazette

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