Jul 23 2009
The Addams Family Musical: Can We Please Stop it With These?
Charles Addams’ ghoulish clan has locked down some prime real estate to haunt, with new tuner “The Addams Family” set to open at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater on April 8.The venue for one of the most hotly anticipated musicals of the season has been a badly kept secret for weeks now, especially since Disney announced it would close the current Lunt-Fontanne tenant, “The Little Mermaid,” Aug. 30. The 1,500-seat theater is one of a handful of Rialto houses in the immediate Times Square radius to benefit from maximum tourist foot traffic.
Look, I don’t care how widely anticipated this play is. I don’t care if it sells out every night for 6 years. Can we please just put an end to making every damned movie or television show into a musical? These shows and movies are not meant to be on Broadway. It’s why they’re on television and film in the first place.
Shrek. What the hell is Shrek doing on Broadway? Won’t that scare the ever living crap out of kids? 100 bucks says it’s just a matter of time before video games become musicals. It will be at that point that I officially pull the plug on my life.
How about an ORIGINAL story for a play? Are producers this pathetic these days? Can you imagine a Robocop musical? I don’t know why but I just feel like it’s in the works.
Source: Variety
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I don’t know…I think some television shows and movies would be great on Broadway.
Imagine a Clockwork Orange musical. How would that not rule? Singing in the rain…
Actually, this musical isn’t an adaptation of the movie or TV series. It’s a brand new story inspired by the orginal Charles Addams cartoons, which is sort of standard practice in musical theater land. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as sick of the “hey, let’s make this recognizable hit movie into a musical” craze as the next person. But most of the great Broadway musicals come from some kind of existing source material - Cabaret, Spring Awakening - based on plays. Chicago was based on a play that had also been a movie starring Ginger Rogers. Fiddler on the Roof and Company were compilations of works of short fiction. Bat Boy was based on a series of Weekly World News articles.
Really, it all boils down to intent. For instance, Shrek. Godawful. But it’s written by award winning (and pretty twisted) playwright David Lindsey-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori (composer of the splendid original musical “Caroline, or Change”). I think one of the reasons that musical offends so much is that the people writing it were obviously cashing in, taking the easy road when they very easily could be producing something vastly more important, if less commercially viable.
So I’ll remain optimistic on “The Addams Family” - for a while at least. It’s at least promising that the people involved took three years to come up with an original plot line instead of very easily appropriating one of the many movie or tv episode plots. I liked Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party quite a bit. And the writers of the book were talented enough to fool everyone into forgetting that Jersey Boys was essentially a jukebox musical. So we’ll see. In any case, you must admit that at closer inspection, this isn’t quite another cynical “Legally Blonde” or “Young Frankenstein”. Which doesn’t mean it won’t be bad. Just a different type.