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 fiancée.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment