On Halloween night, a perfectly spooky occasion for a family of delightful misfits, South Florida Theater caught the opening performance of The Addams Family at the Kravis Center. It was a truncated run, but the enthusiasm of the audience, with the charisma of the cast, made the evening worthwhile. The show, directed by Antoinette DiPietropolo, and featuring Rodrigo Aragón as Gomez and Renee Kathleen Koher as Morticia, found its stride in moments of humor and physical play but faltered in its true resonance, at no fault of the director or actors.
There’s an undeniable charm to seeing the Addamses on stage. Their blend of macabre sensibility and sincere familial affection has always been their most winning quality, and this production honored that tension well. The dark set, with a cartoonish touch, created a visual world that felt lifted from the source material of Charles Addams, while the costumes contributed to that overall comforting atmosphere. The lighting design, too, captured the show’s ghoulish tone, casting shadows that seemed to capture one in its penumbra.
The ensemble performances were uniformly solid. No one gave a bad performance, and several rose to the level of delightful. Melody Munitz as Wednesday delivered a strong vocal performance, even if the songs she was given to sing often worked against the very essence of Wednesday’s character, in this reviewer’s opinion. And Aragón as Gomez bounced with such exuberant energy, stealing the show for me. His charisma carried every scene he entered, and his comic timing hit every beat. Even his portrayal couldn’t save a major structural flaw. Gomez, in this portrayal, leaned heavily into an exaggerated “Spanish” persona, a choice that embraced his colonizing lineage, feeling out of step.
Still, it was Aragón who championed the night. His energy, his delivery, and his love for his family made him the show’s heartbeat. You could feel his duets with Morticia, his tender interactions with Wednesday. This tug-of-war between his two main loves causes the central tension of the musical.
The real trouble with The Addams Family is not the cast, nor the production’s polish, but the musical itself. The Addamses’ delight in darkness, their dry humor, their refusal to conform: this is what we love about them. Instead, the show repeatedly tries to make the Addams family “normal,” sentimentalizing their oddness.
Take Wednesday. She is famous for her deadpan dialogue, a girl who speaks in literal epitaphs. But in this musical, she’s given a string of power ballads that feel antithetical to her essence. How do you imagine Wednesday singing? I hear a monotonous bass, something closer to Lurch’s funereal tone, a sound that would send chills rather than applause. Instead, Lippa’s songs give her Broadway-bright belt moments that belong in Wicked, not in the shadowy world of the Addams family mansion.
