“The Addams Family”
River Center Theatre for Performing Arts
Baton Rouge
Oct. 22
Whether you know “The Addams Family” or not, you know the opening song with its iconic snaps. It was the theme song to the sitcom in the '60s, included in the movie adaptation in the '90s, a popular Halloween song into the 2010s and now a trending TikTok sound every October.
The 2025 tour of “The Addams Family” musical has been making its way around the U.S. and Mexico since September and will continue until Nov. 2. It seems clear that this renewed interest in the 2010 musical comes from the widespread popularity of “Wednesday” on Netflix – the tour website boasts that it’s the third most watched show on the platform. But the feel of this musical is completely different from the Wednesday people have grown to love.
The plot centers around a teenage Wednesday Addams (Melody Munitz), who has fallen in love with a “normal” boy named Lucas Beinecke. She’s invited the Beineckes over to dinner to get to know her eccentric family, hoping that they’ll get along so that they can tell everyone that they’re engaged.
A chaotic clash of personalities and characters unfolds. Despite Wednesday’s pleas for everyone to be normal, her parents Gomez (Rodrigo Aragón) and Morticia (Renee Kathleen Koher) fight over the fact that Gomez is hiding something (news of the engagement) from Morticia. The Beineckes struggle with how weird the Addams family is while dealing with marital problems of their own. And Wednesday’s younger brother, Pugsley (Logan Clinger), acts out because he’s afraid that Wednesday won’t torture him anymore after she gets married.
Inside the theater, there was a conspicuous dearth of people in their teens and twenties — this is not unusual. But there were a number of tween girls, and it feels like the show’s team was expecting them — Uncle Fester (Timothy Hearl) has several lines that aren’t in the original book. He asks if Taylor Swift and Kelce are going to make it and incorporates the “6-7” meme into the beginning of “Let’s not talk about anything else but love.” Later in the play, Wednesday’s grandma (Shereen Hickman) sings a couple lines of a parody of “Shake It Off.” These changes, along with some location-specific one liners (“The Tigers are SEC Champs! Geaux Tigers!”) seem designed to appeal to an audience who might not have seen the musical before or even regularly go to the theater. It’s a noble effort since theaters across the country are struggling to draw younger audiences. (Though I should note that references to Ohio were in the original book. Ohio has been catching strays for a while, apparently.)
The Addams Family has evolved through its many adaptations. The source material is actually a 1938 New Yorker cartoon. But if people's interest in “The Addams Family” musical comes from the supernatural gothic horror show “Wednesday,” they might leave confused. Though the musical changed the costuming of the character from the original musical to look more like the Wednesday we know from TV, the musical’s portrayal of Wednesday is a mix of giggly in love and weirdly serious. Munitz switches from high-pitched emotional pleading with Gomez to the deadpan, low-pitched delivery of the line “I shot dinner,” while handing her parents what is presumed to be a duck or a goose she says found at a petting zoo. In contrast, the Netflix show’s Wednesday, portayed by Jenna Ortega, is supposed to be around the same age, but she’s cold, defiant and honestly a little scary. If you like “Wednesday” for the character who dumps piranhas into a pool of swimming high schoolers without a flinch, this musical is not that.
The musical lacks some internal logic, and some of the musical numbers feel like a fever dream. (Did the Uncle Fester flying through space singing a love ballad to the moon actually happen???) In fact, in its original Broadway run, critics panned the show for its inconsistent tone, but audiences disagreed with them and embraced the musical for all its weirdness. Throughout all the iterations of the Addams Family, they are notoriously a weird bunch, and the musical numbers, clearly influenced from a wide spectrum of styles and sources, have a little bit of something for everyone – spooky or not.
