‘Addams Family’ is creepy, kooky, altogether outstanding at Stageworks
Pop-culture references come and go. But “The Addams Family,” in all its strange and deranged glory, is forever.
What started as a comic strip in 1938 has grown into a freaky franchise that includes the classic black-and-white TV series, live-action and animated films and an upcoming Netflix series centered on Wednesday Addams. “The Addams Family” musical opened on Broadway in 2010 and ran for more than a year with a cast that featured Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia.
Stageworks Theatre, housed in an unassuming strip center in Cypress, takes on a big task in filling the musical’s funny and frightful shoes. Is it possible for a scrappy but modest company to fully inhabit these iconic characters and do justice to the book’s wry humor?
The answer, to put it plainly, is absolutely. Stageworks proves game for the musical’s mix of quirk, camp and heart. The cast, led by a beaming, wonderfully charismatic Stephen Swank as Gomez Addams, is uniformly terrific. Each actor brings their own personal touches to the roles. Director Ryan Scarlata and choreographer Adam W. Delka distill the show’s camp and quirkiness down to the right size for the Stageworks stage. And the sets evoke the right blend of fun and fright.
The story takes the qualities that made “The Addams Family” so appealing, combines them with a few updated plotlines and accentuates them with Andrew Lippa songs, such as “Full Disclosure” and “Pulled,” that do a good job of propelling the plot and establishing the characters. A teenage Wednesday Addams is in love with normal guy Lucas and wants the families to meet. Pugsly Addams is worried that his big sister will forget all about him. Gomez and Morticia wrestle with secrets. Uncle Fester confesses his love for all things lunar during “The Moon and Me,” one of the show’s hilarious highlights.
There’s a lot happening, but the cast makes it easy to follow with crisp, clean performances. Swank’s Gomez holds the show together with strapping confidence and a permanent smile. He’s determined to keep the family happy any way he can and voices it beautifully during “Happy/Sad.” Cassandra Zepeda has arguably a more challenging task as the iconic Morticia, immortalized by Carolyn Jones and later Anjelica Houston. But instead of impersonation, Zepeda does something daring. She creates her own Morticia, retaining the character’s allure and mystery but tempering it with the insecurities and emotions of a woman whose family is rapidly chang ing. It’s a fresh spin on someone we’ve known for a long time.
And, yes, there’s a Gomez and Morticia tango scene that’s everything it needs to be.
Fernanda Schoening Velez, a junior at Sam Houston State University, is also unique in her approach to Wednesday Addams. There’s a clear homage to Christina Ricci, who played the character in the ’90s films. But Ricci wasn’t even a teenager when she first played the role. Somehow, Velez’s Wednesday channels an older Ricci, and it works brilliantly. Velez is wonderful at capturing the character’s stubbornness and confusion through facial expressions and body language. And her flat way of speaking is signature Wednesday. This one deserves her own series, too.
As Pugsly, eighth-grader Stephen Guerra carves out his own space with what could have been an overlooked role. His mischievous glare and finger-tenting quickly become one of the show’s hallmarks. Maighan Granger is so, so good as Grandma Addams that you’ll wish she showed up more often. She’s a standout, from her delivery to her way of walking. They team up on the sweet duet “What If.”
Jackson Cook is equally good as Fester and clearly has empathy for his “fat bald person of no specific sexuality.” He’s eccentric and endearing. Nicholas Lumpkin has little to say as Lurch, of course. But he manages to stand out through body language and a blank expression that seems to be saying a thousand things at once. The “normal” Beineke family includes an appropriately earnest Paul Schoeller as love interest Lucas and Matthew Jamison as Mal, the family’s beleaguered, exasperated patriarch.
Alice Beineke, the exhaustingly optimistic mother, is designed to be a scene-stealer. Even so, Layne Roberts takes it and nearly stages a coup. As an actress, she’s funny and fearless. As a singer, she’s fantastic on “Waiting” and “Crazier
Than You.” You can almost feel the audience bracing itself every time she’s onstage.
You’ll find yourself more happy than sad with Stageworks’ charming production of “The Addams Family.” But they’ll forgive you. Move toward the darkness, as the closing song says.