Da Da Da Da! (Clap Clap) Addams Family JCA Review

It’s a hot March Friday night. Perfect time to go see a play by locals.

Hats off to John Curtin College for another impressive production. This time it’s The Addams Family, and after being blown away by their renditions of The Little Shop of Horrors and Legally Blonde, we sat down with very high expectations.

The plotline: young Wednesday Addams wants to get married and everyone’s making a song and dance about it.

The evening started with a fun musical intro and audience clap along before launching in.

Their costumes, set design, and soundtrack are matched at times only by the calibre of their ambitious choreographed dance routines and singing. Some of those voices truly are astonishing for such young performers.

Highlights that had me cackling from the upper right wing included a tap dance routine by a chorus line of Grim Reapers, Morticia’s icily sharp witty remarks, and Gomez’s sweet honest nature caught between the wrath of two female family members.

Being the big Addams fans that we are, it was a little saddening not to see Cousin IT forming part of the crowd (an infant member of the audience substituted nicely instead occasionally), the handy Thing except for one brief cameo for obvious technical reasons, or the famous Addams brothers’ Mamushka. We danced the Mamushka while Nero fiddled, we danced the Mamushka at Waterloo. We danced the Mamushka for Jack the Ripper, but tonight, we were bereft of the Mamushka. Perhaps that wasn’t the true Fester Addams after all.

Due to the already tenuously thin premise upon which the entire play is based upon, for us the songs felt quite lacking. A huge focus on love quickly grew repetitive. Pugsley expresses a Stockholm Syndromesque addiction to torture by his psychopathic sister that is very funny in the moment but oh it does not date well in a modern context. There’s also plenty of jokes levelled against their ancient grandmother and Morticia’s perhaps uncharacteristic dread of ageing which again, was the norm in the 1990s and is less palatable now.

Wednesday is curiously self conscious and desperate to appear conventional in front of her future in laws, completely at odds with the fearless goth we remember. Same applies to her parents, eager to supplicate their daughter, in spite of the famous Addams motto “Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc (“We gladly feast on those who would subdue us”).

Will I ever forgive them for taking a miserable, rasping bald hunchback like Fester and converting him to an upright optimist infatuated with the moon, represented literally in dance by a grey medicine ball, prancing around singing la la la when he’s not playing the ukelele?

Never.

My stilted capacity for it must be influenced by the Addams Family.

Am I still looking forward to seeing their new comedy musical?

Absolutely.

Preferably one that isn’t based on something I’m sentimentally attached to if tonight taught me anything.

The Addams Family is showing at John Curtin College of the Arts until March 29th.

To book tickets and see more of their upcoming plays, go here.

By Gayle O’Leary. If you’d like to catch up on more by Gayle here on Fremantle Shipping News, look right here!

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