For those who’ve not experienced a musical in concert before, it’s not quite what you would expect from a traditional musical that you might catch on London’s West End. It’s important to get expectations in place – we weren’t anticipating that this would be a hugely lavish production, and we were correct: the staging and choreography is quite limited and simple, the costumes are fine but unremarkable, the sets and props are limited. The Addams Family is also doing a very short run (three shows!) which meant we caught the first performance – resulting a few missed microphone and lighting cues.
The end product was still perfectly entertaining, however. It’s an impressive cast – the headline name here, of course, is RuPaul’s Drag Race icon and star of 1990s girl group Seduction, Michelle Visage. She delivers her deadpan lines with expert comic timing and is a proficient singer and dancer too. While it’s an impressive ensemble piece, we were also particularly taken with Ramin Karimloo as Gomez, Sam Buttery as Uncle Fester and Kara Lane as Wednesday’s prospective mother-in-law Alice, who all turned in brilliantly memorable performances.
It’s a fairly straightforward – and at the same time completely ridiculous – story. Wednesday (Chumisa Darnford-May, who displays some real vocal talent) has fallen for a ‘normal’ boy, Lucas (Ryan Kopel). Wednesday has invited Lucas and his parents over for a dinner to meet the family, which she just wants to be ‘normal’ – which is, of course, quite unrealistic when you’re a member of the Addams Family. Proceedings, unsurprisingly, go somewhat awry, and so begins an evening full of twists and turns, populated with an array of weird and wonderful characters.
We enjoyed our evening spent with The Addams Family – it’s not the most polished production we’ve seen at The Palladium, but we weren’t expecting that. The show contains lots of highlights, with several decent songs (the band sounds great) and numerous laugh-out-loud, darkly comedic punchlines. It all moves along at a fair pace thanks to the energetic, lively performances from the talented cast. It may only have a brief run but we’re glad to have it here – hugely entertaining stuff.
GAY TIMES gives The Addams Family – 4/5
More information can be found here.
Latest
