At times the choreography matches the kooky nature of the Addams Family the world has come to know and love since it splashed onto television screens and later the silver screen, with jerks and jolts driving the actors’ movement, but the inevitable tango scene involving Gomez and Morticia lacks any sense of lust or romance, rather it comes off as a slow paced exercise featuring two tired Broadway heavyweights. Bebe Neuwirth‘s dancing days are long behind her, although unlike Lane, she can blame it on a titanium hip.

Better billed as the ‘Wednesday Addams Show,’ all but Rodriguez’s character are mostly one dimensional, essentially there to provide the audience with recognizable anchors to latch onto as they sit through two and a half hours of a show that has a plot more suited for a half hour television episode.

Broadway’s resident character actress Jackie Hoffman as Grandma fares the best amongst her fellow one-note characters, as she is at least given a handful of zingers to play around with, and her ability to ring laughs out of even the blandest jokes proves essential to keeping the pace moving along.

When the loudest applause comes from a nearly split second cameo by a floating hand, Thing, and a ball of hair, Cousin It, logic has it that something is foul in the graveyard. After the reported hefty advance sales run dry, it would suit the Broadway community to dispense of ‘The Addams Family’ as fast as it did that other clunky deadly musical, ‘Young Frankenstein,’ and free up the theatre for something more suited for musical comedy, like ‘Munsters: the Musical.’