Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre welcomes the ghosts-and-goblins season with the creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky clan known as The Addams Family, providing Southland audiences with the snap-snappiest Halloween entertainment in town.

From the darkly humorous single-panel cartoons appearing in the New Yorker from 1938 on, to the black-and-white sitcom of the mid-1960s, to the ‘73 or ‘92 animated series, to the ’91 film adaptation (or either of its two sequels), to the 2010 Broadway musical bearing their name, the Charles Addams creations better known as The Addams Family have been bewitching the world for nearly eighty years.

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice center their tweaked-for-the-tour book around daughter Wednesday’s insistence that her parents (Johnny Fletcher as Gomez and Erica Marie Weisz as Morticia) and the rest of the Addams clan give her decidedly un-ghoulish boyfriend Lucas and his parents “One Normal Night” at an Addams Family dinner.

Unfortunately, not even the out-of-character yellow dress that Wednesday (Amanda Minano) dons or her family’s promise to try to behave normally can hide the fact that the Addamses (Greg Nicholas as Uncle Fester, Jennifer Wilcove as Grandma, Michael Gallo as Pugsly, and Mitch Stark as butler Lurch) resemble no one whom Lucas (Colby Rummell) or his parents Mal and Alice Beineke (Jim Skousen and Debbie Prutsman) have ever met before.

After all, how many families have parents who do swordplay as foreplay, a son who worries that his gone-normal older sister won’t be torturing him anymore, or an uncle who confesses to being in love with the moon?

Then comes the moment when the young lovers announce some life-altering plans and, with a sudden change in the weather preventing the Beinekes from taking their disapproving leave, theatergoers have more than enough reason to stick around for Act Two.

Composer/lyricist Andrew Lippa’s melodies are catchy and his lyrics as clever as can be and Brickman and Elice’s book is not only deliciously campy, it is spiced with pop culture references as recent as today’s news feed.

Chuck Ketter proves a perfect choice to direct for Candlelight, capturing the tongue-in-cheek tone of The Addamses’ multiple incarnations while eliciting performances that evoke affectionate memories of a 2-season TV sitcom that has remained a fan favorite for over fifty years.

 Fletcher gives Gomez muchisimo Latin lover panache opposite Weisz’s sultry, seductive sizzler of a Mortitia, and when Weisz raises Senora Addams’s skirt for the leggiest of tangos, va va voom!

The always lovely Minano’s delectably deadpan Wednesday shows off power pipes opposite newcomer Rummel’s sunny charmer of a Lucas.

Nicholas steals every scene he’s in as the loopy Uncle Fester, Wilcove shrinks into gray-haired Granny’s grizzled skin to delightful effect, Gallo’s Pugsley is as funny as he is sweet, and Stark’s towering Lunch harbors an eleventh-hour vocal surprise.

Candlelight treasures Skousen and Prutsman have the time of their musical comedy lives as the prim-and-proper, supposedly “normal” Mal and Alice, and just wait till Prutsman’s Alice lets it all hang out, figuratively that is, in “Full Disclosure.”

Last but definitely not least are the specters of Addamses past, raised from their graves in a variety of ingenious ghostly white guises spanning from prehistoric to 20th Century times, and brought to highly individualized “life” by ten of the most talented song and dance star around town: Jeffrey Bonser, Madeline Ellingson, DarRand Hall, Gavin Juckette, Daniel Justin, Kylie Molnar, Lia Peros, Keegan Michael Riojas, Christianne Holly Santiago, and Dayna Sauble, though audience members wishing to know who’s playing Bride, Caveman, Conquistador, Flapper, Flight Attendant, Gambler, Indian, Puritan, Saloon Girl, or Soldier won’t be helped by a program that lumps them all together as “Ancestors.”

Kirklyn Robinson graduates from Ancestor at 3-D Theatricals to Candlelight chorographer, giving the dead-but-not-forgotten even more to do, including spending time among the dinner theater diners when they’re not up on stage doing dance after dance, including a great big opening number that has the entire Addams clan line doing the bunny hop, the twist, and the rigor mortis as only the dead, dying, and motion-challenged can do.

Musical director Rod Bagheri elicits topnotch vocals from the entire cast as sound engineer Nick Galvan provides a crystal-clear mix of amped vocals, almost-live-sounding prerecorded tracks, and Halloween-ready effects.

The Addams Family looks as terrific as it sounds, thanks to scenic designer Ketter’s imposing haunted house, Steven Pliska’s dramatic lighting, The Theatre Company’s pitch-perfect costumes coordinated by Merrill Grady and Linda Vick, Michon Gruber-Gonzales’s wild and occasionally wacky wigs, and some gorgeously ghoulish makeup.

Caleb Shiba is stage manager. Dylan Pass is assistant choreographer.

Like The Rocky Horror Show and The Little Shop Of Horrors before it, The Addams Family’s mix of the hilarious, the tuneful, and the macabre makes it the ideal October/November show. At Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, it makes for an especially scrumptious Halloween season treat.

Candlelight Pavilion, 455 W. Foothill Blvd., Claremont.
www.candlelightpavilion.com

–Steven Stanley
October 27, 2018

Tags: Andrew Lippa, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, Charles Addams, Los Angeles Theater Review