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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:22] Mo Brady: As I said in our first episode, I was surprised to find out about the popularity of the musical version of The Addams Family. Having experienced the show from the inside almost a decade ago, I knew it to be only a modest success. When I learned that for more than four years, The Addams Family has been the most produced musical in North America, I had to find out how.

[0:46] Mo Brady: My first stop on that journey was reaching out to an old colleague, Rick Elice. Along with Marshall Brickman, Rick wrote the book for the musical adaptation of The Addams Family. Rick and I's path crossed a handful of times during my tenure with the original Broadway production. He was in the room when I had my final audition, and he was in the building to put in new leads when the show closed on New Year's Eve 2011. But I mostly knew Rick from being the husband of our leading man, Roger Rees, who took over the role of Gomez Addams two months into my run.

[1:19] Mo Brady: Last month, I reached out to Rick for the first time in more than nine years. Imagine my surprise when he replied within 24 hours, excited about an opportunity to discuss the show. In the years since, Rick has written the script for Peter and the Starcatcher, The Cher Show, and has maintained multiple companies of his show Jersey Boys, currently the 12th longest-running show in Broadway history. But he was excited to go back in time and talk about why he thought the show worked.

[1:54] Mo Brady: When he got on the call for our interview, Rick told me that my reaching out at this time was serendipitous, because he had just gotten the fact sheet from one of the show's co-creators.

[2:09] Rick Elice: Did you ever get the fact sheet?

[2:11] Mo Brady: The fact sheet? No.

[2:12] Rick Elice: Well, believe it or not, somebody named Andrew Lippa, who wrote the songs for the show...

[2:17] Mo Brady: I've heard of him, yeah.

[2:19] Rick Elice: ...called me and Marshall, maybe it was only last week, Mo. I mean, it's sort of amazing that this is all happening at the same time. And he started rattling off these statistics. I said, where did you get these statistics from? And he said, well, from the licensing company TRW, Theatrical Rights Worldwide, I'm sure you know it. And I said, what are they? And he said, well, I'll send them to you. So are you ready for this? The Addams Family has been the most produced show in North America for three of the last four years, and was in second position the one year it wasn't first, behind Beauty and the Beast, that one year. What you should also know is how much of a global phenomenon the musical is.

Worldwide, the Addams Family musical has played in over 37 countries, internationally, excluding North America. These productions have been seen by audiences totaling over $3,750,000, with gross box office revenue of over $150 million. That was when Marshall started paying attention. In the United States, productions playing in schools, community, amateur and professional, regional theaters account for over 48,000 performances, with combined audiences of over 29,590,720, generating over, and I'm just reading you what it says, $562,995,000 of gross box office revenue. I said, well, it must be gross, because I sure as hell haven't seen a whole lot of that. When adding the attendance from Non-Equity Tour in the United States, an additional 500,000 people have seen the show with gross box office revenue over $38 million.

Amazing results for your amazing musical. And this is not from, this is not Andrew making it up. This is from TRW. When you talk about the success, I mean, literally, I had no idea until a week ago. And then, as if by wizardry, I heard from you, and I thought, wow, I guess this is like really a thing. I guess The Addams Family is really a thing. Nobody told me.

[4:23] Mo Brady: As one of the writers of the piece, I want to ask you why you think this show has garnered all of those statistics. Yes, we know The Addams Family is about this iconic pop culture story coming from these cartoons. But what do you think is the core message of the musical?

[4:37] Rick Elice: Oh, the core message you want, huh? Well, here's what I can tell you. From our very earliest conversations about the show, Marshall and Andrew and I started from the word in the title, the. I'm kidding. Not the. And not even Addams. I mean, family. Everything we did, and every version of the show we wrote, and there were many versions of the show, had family as the core message. Our premise was always that family is everything and everything else is nothing. And of course, there is no family without acceptance. And acceptance is hard, asking for it and giving it. And it's one of those dark corners of our family lives, acceptance, who has it, who gives it, who wants it, but is afraid to ask for it, who has it to give, but is determined not to give it.

So core message, I guess, if as a family, we, you know, we move toward that dark corner and not run from it, no matter how frightening it may be. But if we move toward that darkness, we find acceptance, peace and love. And that's our core message. And that's why it's the final statement of the show. What I like to do is I like to make sure that the thing I want the audience to talk about afterwards, aside from, you know, where are we going to go for cheesecake, is the very last thing that they hear. And the very last thing that the audience hears at the end of The Addams Family is move toward the darkness and love. Of course, yes, it's funny to think of these are people who live under the rock and, you know, you pick up the rock and they go scuttling away from the light into the darkness.

It struck us as amusing in terms of the Addams inversion, that everything the Addams like, we normal people, we regular people dislike, everything that they dislike, we love. And, you know, there are all those Broadway musicals that end with step into the lights, come into the sun, you know, the lights get big and bright and everything is happy. And so we said, right here in this very room, at that very piano behind me, I said to Andrew one day, let's do a number where it's move into the darkness, because the darkness is mystery. What light, you know, what you can't see. We're raised to think that that's scary, but the Addams Family, they don't think it's scary. They love the dark. They're amused by it.

They're intrigued by it. They're entranced by it and attracted to it. So move toward that darkness, what's going to happen, the mystery of life, move toward it, because that's where love is. And that seems to me to be a good core message for every family, not just the Addams Family.

[7:04] Mo Brady: You talked about the show going through variations on its way to what is now licensed in all of these countries and stock productions around the world. How close do you feel like the opening night on Broadway was at getting to that core message?

[7:22] Rick Elice: Well, opening night on Broadway, I think it was April 8th, 2010. It was a surprisingly warm night. We played in Chicago until just after New Year's. And then we came back to New York every day being sort of slit open like a filleted fish by Michael Riedel, writing lies in his column that we were all on vacation in the Caribbean, all this nonsense. We were here, we were here mostly in this room behind me, Jerry Zaks and Mary Mitchell Campbell, Andrew Lippa, Marshall Brickman and I, working on the show, rewriting the show. We had about a month to do it. I think rehearsal started at the beginning of Feb. And then we had to recheck the show. It had to be the physical production that we had. There were certain things about the show that we had to keep, even though we thought we no longer wanted to do, but we were sort of painted into that corner.

[8:21] Mo Brady: What do you mean?

[8:21] Rick Elice: You know, all that squid stuff, you may remember, you know.

[8:27] Mo Brady: Oh, I remember playing squid arms.

[8:27] Rick Elice: And you may remember that there was a squid in the show, which sort of overtook the production of our first set of directors who didn't quite understand what we were aiming for and didn't quite like Broadway in general, and didn't quite like us, I think, more specifically. And so things weren't happening as we had imagined them. But we couldn't jettison everything because we had, because all of that was built and all of that existed. And it's very expensive to do that, as you know. So we had to try to find ways in and out of situations that would justify having a gigantic squid in the cast. And we had, I guess, the month of January to write it. And then we had the month of February to rehearse it.

And then we started previews beginning of March, and we opened April 8th. Towards the end of the preview period, once Jerry had sort of come in and directed the show, you know, as a properly joined up show, which we never had in Chicago, the audiences started to love it. I mean, I was saying to Marshall last week, do you remember, we sat in the back of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre one night, and just for our own amusement, because the laughs were, we both love to hear audiences laugh. I'm sure that's true of everybody who writes for the theatre. It's the greatest sound in the world as an audience. A thousand strangers all laughing together because of something that a character says or does on stage.

And we were hearing these big, big laughs. And so I said, let's sit in the back and let's just do a laugh count. And we had 104, we had 104 laughs, and I'm not even counting like the titters. I'm not counting anything smaller than a guffaw. And the next night we counted again, and it came out about the same. And we thought, wow, you know, we've rounded the bend, as some presidents say, you know, we've rounded the corner. We were wrong about COVID, and we were wrong about The Addams Family, because what happened was the, well, I don't know that we were wrong, but the critics felt very differently than it seemed the audiences were. So we thought that at last, after all that struggling, we thought we'd moved The Addams Family characters toward the darkness pretty successfully.

The audiences seemed to agree by the time we were getting ready to open. But, you know, the critics did not like our show, and the reviews set us back because they put a chip on the audience's collective shoulder. And it took a while for the people to start enjoying themselves again, which eventually they did, which is why we won the Broadway.com Favorite Musical Award that season, because the audience voted for us and not critics or the community, you know, which is always influenced by what the reviews are. It was very, very hard on the cast. The cast that you joined towards the end of their run, at the beginning of that run on Broadway, was really, really hard for them. Beginning on April 9th, people were pretty happy backstage, even though there were personality issues, and you know, there were some conflicts, and everything seemed to be doing well.

And then the reviews came out, and I told my friend Mr. Brickman, you know, who's a movie guy, so he doesn't know about, you know, this sort of thing. I said, we have to go to the theater, you know, we just have to go to the theater and be there, because we have to demonstrate that we're going, we're still there. This is going to be very, very hard for them to go out and be funny. And it was. It was really, really hard for them to go out and be funny. And it was really, really hard to go.

[11:39] Rick Elice: Backstage and listened to people really upset, because they had to go out and be funny, knowing that the audience was going to be so cool, because the reviews were unkind. And they were unkind about the actors. I mean, really, it was we as the writers, and, you know, Jerry as the director, you know, we took the hit, but the actors are the ones who have to go out and do it. And it broke my heart for them to have to go out and perform under those conditions. But it just so happened that there were like 30 people who arrived to see the show that night, all dressed up like Addams Family characters. And so it was kind of like a goofy, crazy audience. And they were enthusiastic. And so we thought, oh, well, maybe it'll just be like this.

Maybe the audience will just enjoy the show. Maybe this audience doesn't read the reviews. But of course, that was not the case. So there was this sort of real slough of despond that the cast had to go through because the audience was coming and sitting there with their arms folded saying, I hear you really suck. It's just hard, but they battled through it. And the show was always doing well. And then after a year, the cast changed over, several people changed over. And then a couple three months after that, I guess the rest of the changes happened and for that second year, until they wrapped up the show. The idea was that the show that we opened the national tour with, which was in September of 2011, the plan was to launch the tour and then to retrofit those changes into the Broadway show.

But of course, Broadway is not constructed to be an art in progress. You know, it's, you know, once a show opens, it's open and there's no mechanism really to do anything more than have that one rehearsal call every Thursday if you have a put in or it's so expensive to make any changes, technical changes in a show once it's running, that it takes a real commitment, a financial commitment from the producers. And I guess they were thinking about the winter of 2012 and what that would be like and that it just wouldn't be worth it. And then it turned out that the tour version of the show was wildly successful. And that's, you know, that's the show that enjoys all the success now, that version of the show, the non-squid, the squid-free production.

[14:04] Rick Elice: So tell me about those changes beyond the squid, specifically through this lens of reaching the core message, the fact that you were supposed to rewrite, but basically not redesign a show in a month's time, you know, from January to February 2010. Obviously, that's a heavy lift. But then you have this time to really sit back and... It's what it is. I mean, it's not a heavy lift. It's the life we've chosen. I mean, that's what it is when you're writing a show. You know, Marshall and I were very lucky with Jersey Boys. We did Jersey Boys out of town. The show seemed to work. The audiences were very happy. The reviews were good. We found producers to take us to New York. We didn't change the show, but we were just very lucky as first-timers to get it right the first time.

We didn't know that that wasn't the way it was always supposed to happen. But, you know, the idea of having a month to rewrite seems to me to be, that to me is like the funnest part. Writing for the theater, Arthur Lawrence, the great, late Arthur Lawrence said, is rewriting. That's what writing for the theater is. It's only rewriting. That's all you really ever do. You argue things into existence. You negotiate by tantrum sometimes, but you breathe life into something as a collaborative art. And that to me, the collaborative part of that is the thrill for me. So I didn't see that January as a punishment. And after the show opened on Broadway and was running, and there was going to be a national tour, we the writers said to the producer, we'd like to rewrite the show.

I mean, in a substantial way and in a free way, not with the clock ticking, because there was no clock ticking. We won't rewrite it so that it'd be more expensive. We'll rewrite it so that it'll be less expensive to put on so that you don't need to worry. We're not, don't freak out. There's not going to be any ocean liners, you know, or live horses or anything like that. We'll figure out a better way to tell this story and we will present it to you. And that will be the thing that we're rehearsing. Jerry Zaks, the director was on board with that. And the producers said, okay, you know, it's going to change the financial structure because instead of just remounting something with a new cast for the road, we're going to actually rehearse something from scratch. It wasn't like a little cosmetic fix here and there. It was, it was a whole new script and five or six new songs and no squid and no cephalopods at all.

[16:26] Rick Elice: You know, we changed the trajectory of the story. The plot still revolves around Wednesday's coming of age and falling in love with an apparently unacceptable boy and asking for her parents' blessing. That's the plot. It was the plot of The Addams Family that you were in on Broadway. It's the plot of The Addams Family to this very day. It also is, let's face it, the plot of Fiddler on the Roof. So for the tour, what we did was we invented the twist where Wednesday confides only in Gomez, her father, and gets him to agree against his better instincts to keep her engagement to this boy a secret from her mother Morticia. And Gomez knows that to keep a secret from his wife, as any husband knows, to keep a secret from your spouse is a very bad idea.

But he can't say no to his little girl. So he embarks on this very, very rough road because a marriage built on secrets between spouses is a marriage built on sand. And when Morticia discovers that she's been lied to and that secrets are being kept from her by her own family, everyone in the family starts, as it were, getting sand in all their cracks and crevices and hilarity ensues. So our tour version of the show tests the great love between Gomez and Morticia in a way that the Broadway show didn't. And by extension, it tests the love between all the couples in our show, Wednesday and the boy, the boy's parents, Fester and the moon. And putting love to this test, almost breaking it, and then resolving it, turns out to be very satisfying for the audience.

And eventually all is resolved, again, through acceptance and respect, and Addams love for each other is restored. And that people coming to see the show are able to laugh uproariously, which was always our goal. The tour casts were treated like rock stars around, you know, as they went around the country, because the audiences were digging the show so much. And it was about making Gomez and Morticia the tension point in the story as opposed to them functioning as this great marriage, which we've always seen them to be in the Charles Addams cartoons and the TV series. I mean, to really put this tension into the relationship, because of her feelings about secrets in a marriage, and the backstory that justified that anxiety, that secrets created in her, that, you know, eventually it ends the marriage. I mean, she leaves him, and he goes and gets her back. But she leaves him, because he's lied to her. And that's, I suppose, something that a lot of married people can understand and relate to.

[18:56] Rick Elice: Are you unhappy, my darling? Oh, yes. Yes. Completely.

[19:10] Mo Brady: I don't know anything about the tour, other than I think it ended in a wedding at the curtain call. I feel like somebody told me that.

[19:17] Rick Elice: That's right. It ends with Wednesday's marriage to this boy. What I pitched was the not for nothing, you know, having been married for 35 years to a great Shakespearean actor, something that Roger invariably would say is, well, what did Shakespeare do? How did Shakespeare solve this problem? Not that it was a problem, but many of Shakespeare's comedies end in weddings, or wedding-like rituals, which, you know, is to let the audience understand these couples coming together. A lot of the Shakespeare comedies are the correct couples being split apart, but at the end, the correct couples come back together. Another example like this is A Little Night Music, which begins with a piece of music, and you see all these couples dancing, but they're not dancing with the correct partners.

And at the end of the show, you see finally, the couples are dancing, each partner with the correct partner. It takes the events of the show to get the characters to understand that, oh, no, I need to turn away from him, I need to turn towards her, et cetera, until the couples are rearranged in the way that God meant them to be, or that love meant them to be. Love is usually, in the Shakespeare plays, frequently represented by a god or goddess-like presence. So, yes, the curtain call at the end of The Addams Family is Wednesday's wedding, so that we understand that it actually happened, you know, it's not like they were just talking about it. And then the curtain comes down. You know, there is this celebration, and you get this idea that, going back to the original core message, which is family is everything, the show opens with a small clutch of people, the Addams Family characters that we've always known, and there they are, standing right there at the gates under the Addams Family tree, and it's this very small, tight family unit.

At the end, the family unit is twice as big, and the family has expanded through acceptance and love, and that's a great, it's just a great sum-up of what the show is about, and great to be able to present it to an audience, because, yeah, you got to do a curtain call anyway. And it's fun, it's like, it's fun to have Lurch be the minister at a wedding. One of the actors on the tour told me about it, and I was like, of course it ends in a wedding, that's the perfect ending. I remember, I remember, we were in, we literally were in the Big Easy, and I remember talking about this to Jerry and Marshall and Andrew, and Marshall and Andrew were, you know, very, very skeptical, because it's like, oh, can't we just, like, do a curtain call?

Aren't we done yet? And Jerry, a director, said, yes, okay. And I said, here's how we can do it. It's not going to cost any extra money, because the producer was there too. All we'll do is we'll have a little, we'll have a little canopy, it can be four broomsticks, a little thing, like a little chuppah, and we'll do it very, very, very simply, but it'll just be clear to the audience that it's a wedding. And Jerry said, yes, I know, I know just how to do it. I know, I know how to stage it, I know how to stage it. And I went running up to, to the Motel 6, you know, room, somewhere in the, right in the middle of the lake. And, and I called up to New York and said to Raj, we're doing, we're going to do Shakespeare, we're ending it with Shakespeare. We're going to have the big Shakespearean wedding, and we're going to come up and we're going to put it into the show in New York, which was the plan then. But that was a lot of fun.

[22:35] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Rick Elice for sharing his stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by Kirsten Anderson, Jackson Klein, and me, Mo Brady. Please rate and review The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. Our Patreon members have on-demand access to our archive, including full conversations with our guests and early access to episodes. You can support us for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.