'The Addams Family' opens on Broadway with hilarious Nathan Lane, a little more snap-snap!

THEATER REVIEW

NEW YORK - The Addams Family enjoys near-death experiences. Broadway investors not so much. And thus “The Addams Family,” a musical conceived by a group of artists as individually gifted but collectively counter-intuitive as the lovable family created by cartoonist Charles Addams, opens on Broadway after taking a big lurch toward popular appeal.

At the Chicago tryout, this deeply confused show couldn't stop running from the TV show on which it was pointedly not based. On Broadway, the fingers start snapping at the top of the overture.

They don't give out awards for “most improved,” and “The Addams Family” did not undergo some spectacular 11th-hour artistic unification. But clear-eyed changes have moved what was a wildly uneven but ambitiously progressive affair in Chicago much more in the direction of classic, full-tilt, fast-paced, old-fashioned musical comedy — and regardless of reviews, they're almost certain to cement this immensely popular title as a commercial hit on Broadway and beyond. (The show opened on Broadway with a whopping $15-million-plus advance and has been racking up “Wicked”-like box office returns since previews). 

The truly groundbreaking show that Oken and the British director and design team of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch wanted to forge is, I fear, never to be. That's partly because Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's book — a cheerfully insouciant and self-aware Broadway yarn about Addams daughter Wednesday falling in love with a normal boy from Ohio and demanding that her family act normally when his comes for dinner — was just never compatible with the Brits' clear preference for the sharper edge of gothic horror, nor with Andrew Lippa's restless and disparate style of musical composition.

But it's mostly because this show asked an audience who'd bought their tickets based on the popularity of a movie and TV-spinoff to think first of the single-panel Addams cartoons. That was trying to put the proverbial genie back in the lamp. And the genie resisted. 

But with the help of the savvy show doctor Jerry Zaks, everyone has swallowed hard and emphasized what was good about this show, and what was, given the circumstances, achievable. And the result is a mostly enjoyable mainstream entertainment, led by the very droll Kevin Chamberlin, a most lovable sort of Uncle Fester, and, as Gomez, the unflappably excellent Nathan Lane, the greatest musical comedian of his generation.

The opening now introduces the family in a way the audience can enjoy. Lippa's amusing new opening number, “When You're an Addams,” sets an entirely different and far more accessible tone and allows the audience to see the family doing the creepy stuff they came to see them do. It's far and away the most important change to the show. “Give us shadows, give us gloom,” the Addamses now sing, to general delight. “Give us glass in a motel room.”

It no longer feels like the name of the Beinecke Family, the invented Ohioans enthusiastically played by Terrence Mann and Carolee Carmello, should have been the one on the marquee. Zaks has given both Zachary James' Lurch and Jackie Hoffman's Grandma, always huge comedic strengths of this show, a whole lot more shtick to fire off. The ancestors (who make up the chorus) now have a clearer reason for existing in the show. And, thank heavens, Bebe Neuwirth's Morticia is no longer anyone's “Second Banana.”

This complicated actress still comes with a discernible edge, but she is no longer forced to be miserable all night long. And her replacement song, “Just Around the Corner,” is a droll ditty wherein she doesn't kvetch about growing old and insignificant but looks forward, with Morticia-like cool, to her own demise.

Lane — funny, warm, delightful — now carries the show more than ever. And, perhaps due to the hostility of the outside gossips, the two stars of the night have drawn noticeably closer together and created a relationship that now carries most of the requisite warmth. The new number “Morticia,” an homage to the woman “with the dress cut down to Venezuela,” helps greatly, as does their lamentation of where they went wrong with their child rearing of Krysta Rodriguez's ever-spunky Wednesday. “We took her to funerals in the morning mist,” they sing. “Slaughterhouses. Schindler's List.”

If all of Lippa's lyrics were that funny, the house would be in stitches all night. And if his tunes were snappier, those fingers in the front row would wear out. Some of the newer ditties are droll indeed and some of the rumbling orchestral themes are ambitious ruminations. Heck, Lippa was never charged with being Mel Brooks, and the notes he created for this show manage to be both festering and melodic, mostly as the material demands.

I suspect some in the group originally assembled by Oken will look out at the patches to the show and wonder what might have been.

Who knows? For sure, Oken, Crouch and McDermott can take solace in the abiding beauty and complexity of the physical environment they created. “The Addams Family” looks spectacular. That was true, even back in Chicago.

“The Addams Family” plays at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St., New York. Contact 877-250-2929 or theaddamsfamilymusical.com.