Les Dennis is a wonderful jester as Fester
The Addams Family (New Wimbledon Theatre) Verdict: Delightfully deadpan ★★★★✩
Starting as a new Yorker magazine cartoon in 1938, the comically ghoulish addams Family is best know to most of us from the black-and-white Sixties TV series — and perhaps the film with anjelica Huston.
But this touring musical, starring Samantha Womack, Les Dennis and Carrie Hope Fletcher, unveils comic delights of its own.
First seen on Broadway in 2010, rick Elice and Marshall Brickman’s story (with andrew Lippa’s jaunty lyrics and music) is somewhat reminiscent of the rocky Horror Show.
But it’s absolutely steeped in the addams’s best gothic traditions, ensuring that the dead is once more put into deadpan, as crossbow- carrying daughter Wednesday falls for a normal young man from an unsuspecting all-american family. But never mind that. it’s the oddball characters we’ve come to see! and they don’t disappoint.
Cameron Blakely is marvelously suave as gomez, the moustachioed paterfamilias crooning over Womack, playing his elegantly sardonic wife Morticia in her trademark slinky black dress (‘ bright colours are for people with no inner life’).
Hope Fletcher, as the headstrong Wednesday, is an insouciant little sadist — even if her hectoring songs veer a bit too close to another musical: Wicked. Les Dennis is luminous, too, as the corpulent wraith Uncle Fester (below). He has a particularly charming scene in which he falls in love with the Moon. and Valda aviks’s grandma sees off any danger of sentimentality with a hilarious account of geriatric incontinence.
Yes, it’s a teeny bit risque — but never coarse. and there’s a great tumble - d own set, in rusty colours, from Diego Pitarch — and a chorus of zombies, dancing, poker-faced, to alistair David’s choreography. there are memorable moments elsewhere, too, such as when normal mum Charlotte Page drinks a truth serum and bursts into a yodelling indictment of her stiff-as-a-fish husband. But the whole of Matthew White’s production is finely tuned, right down to the smallest gestures of thing, the disembodied hand that, er, lends a hand around the haunted house. all in all, a franchise well worth dusting off.