Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth
photo by Joan Marcus

And what, pray tell, is the hottest ticket in New York? For the deadest show, wouldn’t you know… Deadest story, deadest execution, deadest conception, and laughing all the way to the bank. $15,000,000 advance sale? Don’t they know the critics panned the show, unanimously? Don’t they care? Well, no, they don’t. Which is one of those blessings that occur once in a blue, dead moon. Usually, if a big musical gets drubbed and has lashes of backing, such as most of the Disney hits, drubbed shows turn into hits by outlasting the tiny, tinier, tiniest voices of those who dismissed, those who scoffed, those who disdained the dismal, colossal blunderings and there you are: hit. Endurance is the greatest hit of all. As the Great White Way vividly attests. But that doesn’t have a darned thing to do with The Addams Family which was a hit before it opened its mouth. Everybody adored the warm, funky ghoulish family on TV. Even the cartoon version. (Well, not everybody.) And also the movies, more than one. And that irresistible jingle signature opening tune? At least the producers got that right. They nailed it onto this show. It’s the only song—well, let us not speak ill of the dead.

Because it just don’t pay. The Addams Family harks back to the New Yorker cartoons which caused all this gravely humor to bloom in the first place, which may throw off most of the gleeful audience at first but not to worry. They love every deadly clunk of the changing sets, every deadly misfire of every joke because that man who can read the telephone book out loud and kill you, Nathan Lane, is turning it all into pearls. He revels in dead lines. He is having a ball pushing that rock up hill, schlepping everybody else along. And the plot? I suppose I have to tell you -- well, never mind. You’ve seen it before. You’ll see it again, the very same plot, in the latest go-round of La Cage Aux Folles just around the corner. The one where the boy falls in love with the girl and their families can’t possibly meet, let alone get along. In one, it’s the dread opprobrium of gayness, in the other, it’s the family you wouldn’t be caught dead with. Same thing.

But—The Addams Family has Nathan Lane, one of our truly titanic forces in the theater, and Bebe Neuwirth, whose cleavage threatens throughout, and, praise be, Kevin Chamberlin, the most discovered actor comedian in the business everybody falls in love with and wonders where he’s been before, which his groupies are only too willing to tell you. He plays Uncle Fester. He is a breath of fresh dead air. I also liked Lurch which Zachary James fulfills like a shroud until he’s directed unfortunately into animation. And the audience loves Grandma (Jackie Hoffman) who really knows how to get everything dead right. Or wrong. The tip-off – if you need one – is Wesley Taylor, who plays Lucas, who has fallen in love with Wednesday Addams, played by distraught Krysta Rodriguez, daughter of the family you know and love so well. You applauded him wildly in Rock of Ages (just a block away). Here, he’s deadly, so you know it’s not his fault if you even bother to care.

The show starts brilliantly: The rich, red velvet curtains are parted by a hand, which hauls the drapery twenty feet in the air. I was captured. Around the fourth number, sung by Morticia and Gomez, Bebe and Nathan,” Where did we go wrong” I had answers; by the act’s end, I didn’t. Even the English stopped doing musicals this way fifty years ago. The ghosts, which could have been a good idea, fizzled, misused. The Escher staircases, nicely derivative, could have been a good idea. Went nowhere. Which could have been funny, if deliberate. Uncle Fester’s deadly passion for the moon could have worked. That little boy misfires, needs firing. And throwing up your hands and letting the second act go wherever it wants, or rather doesn’t, is laughable in its own way. Blessings on you, Nathan. Hang on to that advance sale and that’ll be the biggest joke of all.

The Addams Family. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46^th Street. Tickets: $51.50-$136.50. Tue 7 pm. Wed-St 8 pm. Mats, Wed,Wat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm. 212-307-4100.