Review: The Addams Family

Doo doo doo doo. Click click. Who doesn’t recognise this iconic family show theme tune? If that isn’t enough to jog the old memory, a disembodied hand (‘Thing’) being thrust through the curtain of the Byre would probably do the job in placing you in the magical world of Gomez and Morticia Addams (played by Sam Morrison and Ayla Jafri, respectively) and their eccentric family.

Lucy Turner’s spectacular lighting cast shadows, reflections, and gloomily gothic colours onto the cyclorama at the back, which conveniently demarcated the setting. A setting so accurately crafted by Anneli Powell and Iona Gibb with its sliding gates, spiked chair, towering tree, flying dummy, and table reminiscent of the Last Supper. The bench next to the taxi sign also provided the spot for Morticia’s moment of anagnorisis, and, for equal bathetic effect, soft toy animals were used as props at various points in a reminder that — after all — this is a musical comedy.

Comedy is the word that I would use most to describe Caitie Steele (director) and Lucy Randall’s (producer) marvellous production. If there’s one thing they didn’t neglect, it was the humour — the audience rarely went two minutes without laughing. This was also due to the fantastically talented cast, with Eddie Williams’ Fester, the self-ascribed “fat, bald person with no specific sexuality,” winning the audience. He stole our laughs with his masterful ukulele skills and liveliness, which, in a play about the morbid, is even more impressive. Abigail Carpenter proved to be a hilarious Grandma and fooled us all with her age, alongside Jade Morisseau as the mischievous youngest brother and Jakub Chen as the laconic, robotic Lurch, who maintained his role with great conviction.

Emma Tennant lived up to her surname’s fame as Wednesday, with a delightfully macabre performance, acting as the ideal foil to the grounded and earnest Matias Rubio, her lover Lucas, who says he is crazier than Tristan, Ulysses, and Romeo in his love for Wednesday. He must not have two back-to-back tutorials on this graveyard shift of a day. Morrison and Jafri commanded the stage with professionalism, and I thought about how easy it would be to have seen them at the London Palladium production. Morrison’s physicality in particular did justice to Gomez’s flamboyance, and Jafri was able to switch from a terrifyingly dominant mother to accessing her “deep reservoir of womanly compassion.” Gomez had some very witty lines, such as “you look like a crime scene,” “she’s my only Hepatitis-B,” and “my creature of constraint — you have legs!” Morticia’s “I was putting the apple pie on the windowsill to cool” also caused plenty of guffawing.

Keenan Parker was sensationally hilarious as Lucas’ mother, Alice, and had the audience laughing with comments such as “I got licked” and the moment when, after accidentally imbibing the potion during the ‘Full Disclosure’ game, she crawled onto the table and started to convulse maniacally. Her level-headed husband, Mal, played by Luke Curtis, provided a strong antidote to her eccentricity. Unfortunately, there was no real antidote to her spell of madness, which culminated in the song ‘Waiting’ and the rather extended ‘making out’ scene.

The ensemble that portrayed the Addams’ ancestors was fully involved in the action of the play, and Cailean Robertson’s choreography included ballet, the tango, and tap. Particularly impressive was the lift of Morticia as she almost took flight through the roof of the Byre. Luckily for the Health and Safety Officer, she stayed as grounded as the tombstones downstage right. Steele and Randall proved themselves to be outstanding student directors as they cast actors who could not only act well, but also sing, dance, and make us laugh.

In my first-year ignorance, I had assumed all of the music was pre-recorded and in my reviewer’s notes, wrote: “as if there was a live orchestra.” How surprised I was when the back curtain was lifted at the very end of the show, revealing an entire live orchestra — bravo to all of those performers for convincing me I was listening to the original soundtrack!

Reading into the musical’s subtext, there was a subtle degree of politics involved with various puns (such as “setting fire to the Jehovah’s Witness”) delivered slightly provocatively by Gomez and flag-waving at the end. Equally, Fester’s “is Wetherspoons right for the St Andrews scene?” was a nice question in an otherwise textually ‘pure’ production. The faithfulness of the production to the original was certainly a selling point, as everything down to the costumes (all credit to Maya Kruger and Aisla Jennings-Gerlings) was an accurate simulation.

In the upside-down world of the Addams, where torture is seen as a bonding experience for the children and death is exciting, love is still complex, families are still messy, and teenagers are still hormonal. I am not a fan of the clichés “you do you” or “be the best version of yourself,” but the message of going against the grain is an important one for us all to take home. So, scrap nonchalance and embrace a bit of individualism, my little cockroach.

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