Inland Valley Repertory Theatre celebrates its move to the Lewis Family Playhouse with the creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky delight that is (“Snap! Snap!”) Broadway’s The Addams Family, hands down one of the company’s best productions ever.

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 eighty-five years.

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice center their book (adeptly tweaked for the show’s First National Tour) around daughter Wednesday’s (Amanda Minano) insistence that her parents (Benny Perez as Gomez and Sandra Ochoa Rice as Morticia) and the rest of the Addams clan give her decidedly un-ghoulish boyfriend Lucas (Hayden Magnum) and his parents (Patrick McMahon as Mal and Marina Convis as Alice) “One Normal Night” at an Addams Family dinner.

Unfortunately, not even the out-of-character canary yellow dress that Wednesday dons or her family’s promise to try to behave normally can hide the fact that the Addams clan (completed by Frank Minano’s Uncle Fester, Ann Thomas’s Grandma, Cameron Kaeni’s Pugsley, and Mark MacKenzie’s Lurch) resemble no one whom Lucas or his parents 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. As for Brickman and Elice’s book, it couldn’t be more scrumptiously campy.

Following years at Candlelight Pavilion, whose dinner theater setup wasn’t the most sightline-friendly, the venerable company’s move to the state-of-the-art performing arts center that is Rancho Cucamonga’s Lewis Family Playhouse gives The Addams Family a particularly professional sheen, as does an ingenious scenic design by Jessa Orr (doubling as scenic painter) that that proves especially effective combined with Broadway Media’s scary-movie-style animated projections.

Best of all, director Hope Kaufman has elicited pitch-perfect performances from a pitch-perfectly cast ensemble headed by a delightfully droll Perez in Latin lover mode and the curvaceous, statuesque Rice at her slinkiest and sexiest, the duo igniting romantic (and dare I say sexual) sparks galore.

The father-daughter team of Frank and Amanda Minano are on fire, he as the weirdest and wackiest of Uncle Festers and she as the most deliciously dark of teenage girls (with pipes to match Broadway’s best), an Addams Family completed by Thomas’s hilariously haggish Grandmama and MacKenzie’s hilariously hulking Lurch, with charismatic star-in-the-making Kaeni hitting high notes (both sung and screamed) with the greatest of ease.

As for the Beineckes, McMahon is an uptight delight as Mal, Magnum makes Lucas a boy-next-door charmer, and Convis proves herself a scene stealer extraordinaire when Alice lets it all hang loose to outrageous effect in “Full Disclosure.”

Last but not least, Ancestors Marcel Almirantearena, Kaitlyn Boyd, Jeff Deards, Clare Donaldson, Adam Granados, dance captain Tylor Scott Jenkins, Abby Lane, Cassidy Love, Allison Sano, and Nathaniel Vogel (fabulously costumed by Mark Gamez and just as fabulously wigged and made up by V. Michelle Griffiths) are each and every one a standout, and never more so than when choreographer Anthony Tuason has them doing the bunny hop and the twist, and even “dancing” the rigor mortis as only the dead, dying, and motion-challenged can do.

The Addams Family sounds fabulous too, thanks to musical director Ronda Rubio and her twelve-piece pit orchestra and Andrew Nagy’s expert sound design.

Gavan Wyrick’s thrills-and-chills-enhancing lighting and Deards’ just-right props and set furnishings complete and all-around topnotch production design.

Sebastian Balderrama alternates with Kaeni in the role of Pugsley, each of them making an incognito guest appearance during the other’s performance as the youngest Addams. Lorraine Lafferty is stage manager.

I’ve loved Broadway’s The Addams Family since its First National Tour visited SoCal back in 2012 and I wrote: “The Addams Family tour makes for the best kind of family entertainment, its umpteen double entendres destined to delight adults and whoosh right over the heads of kids.”

The same holds true, and then, some, nearly a dozen years later in IVRT’s spooktacular Lewis Family Playhouse debut.

Lewis Family Playhouse, Victoria Gardens Cultural Center, 12505 Cultural Center Drive, Rancho Cucamonga.
www.IVRT.org

–Steven Stanley
October 22, 2023
Photos: DawnEllen Ferry

Tags: Andrew Lippa, Charles Addams, Inland Empire Theater Review, Inland Valley Repertory Theatre, Lewis Family Playhouse