This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

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

[0:22] Mo Brady: In my journey to chronicle the transformation of The Addams Family musical through its many incarnations, I was starting to understand what made the show so unique. Most first national tours are essentially replicas of the Broadway production, but The Addams Family's was not. Launching in the fall of 2011, the touring version of the show turned the focus further into the family. It changed the primary conflict between Wednesday and her parents to between the parents themselves, as I learned from the show's co-writer Rick Ellis. It included a lot of new music and musical staging for both Gomez and Morticia that highlighted that conflict, as I had heard from associate choreographer Dontee Kiehn.

And it doubled down on the humor, adding as many jokes as could fit into the script and staging as possible, said associate director Steve Bebout. And those changes worked. All three of those original creative members, Rick, Dontee, and Steve, said that the continued clarification of the script, score, and staging made the national tour an unequivocal success. And critics agreed. Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "It's hard to think of another show that has been revised so heavily, and for the most part, successfully, by its admiringly indefatigable original authors and composer." But I was starting to wonder, was all this success a fluke? Was the tour just a success in comparison to what had come before?

So I delved into the show's next professional stagings, international productions with the same design, staging, and style as the show's national tour. Lovingly referred to as replica productions, the first international production opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2012, transferring to Rio de Janeiro the following year. Also in 2013, two additional replica productions were mounted in Australia and Argentina. The final replica production opened in Mexico City the following year. And luckily for my research, both original associate choreographer Dontee Kiehn and original associate director Steve Bebout were involved in mounting many of those productions.

[2:42] Mo Brady: So I do want to ask you about those international productions. Tell me all of the countries you went to to stage The Addams Family, if you can remember them all.

[2:50] Steve Bebout: It was a big old chunk of my life now that I look at it. Yeah, so we were in Chicago in 2009, and the Broadway on 2010. We opened the tour in New Orleans, which was just kind of really cool for The Addams Family. From there, we did Brazil in Sao Paulo, that transferred to Rio. And let me tell you, that was not a bad gig at all. Just going to Rio to do a show, I highly recommend it. And then we went to Sydney, Argentina, and then Mexico City.

[3:20] Mo Brady: Okay, so let's say the change from Chicago to Broadway was, I'm gonna make up some numbers here, 40%. And the change from Broadway to tour was 20%. You can tell me if I'm wrong on those percentages. But then what are the percentages of changes from Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Mexico City, or is it all basically the national tour?

[3:41] Steve Bebout: It is more or less the national tour. Here's something kind of fun. The design, you know, I love the design of the show. For Broadway, it was kind of these really, really heavy, substantial set pieces that were automated and moved, you know, to different configurations. And it was quite massive and quite heavy and not tourable in the least. So for the national tour, they had to obviously, as many tours do, create a version that could go in and out of houses all over the United States. So it became, unfortunately and fortunately, to tour a little bit more two-dimensional and lighter and gorgeous as well. But everything that had a certain angle and structure to it became a little bit more flat and a little bit more for standard theaters.

So what was kind of interesting is that by the time we were going to Brazil, you know, a lot of these places were sit-downs. They're not necessarily places they're going to tour. So they wanted a design element that was a hybrid that was functioning like the tour, because that's the show we had, yet was substantial like the Broadway. That's a design element, but I just always thought that was really interesting in terms of problem solving. I remember those big heavy walls, these two walls that could go parallel to the edge of the stage, but could also rotate on an axis to be parallel, basically covering the wings. And one of my first memories was just, don't get in the way of the walls, because they're big and they're heavy and they will not stop for you. They were mammoth.

[5:14] Mo Brady: Did you see a shift in audience response from the tour to international productions that you worked on?

[5:21] Steve Bebout: I will say that the Brazilian production...

[5:25] Mo Brady: Which was the first international tour, yes?

[5:27] Steve Bebout: It was the first replica production, because it had been Broadway, the national tour, and then Brazil. The Brazilian production of that show was so good. And the response was, I mean, raucous. We had a great cast, perfect stars in it. We had Marisa Orth, who is, we always were trying to figure out like, who is she in America? And I think she's Lisa Kudrow. Like, I think that's who she is. She was on a show that was as big as Friends, and she was that well loved. And this great, funny actor named Daniel Boventura, who played Gomez, and this amazing actress, Laura Lobo, who played Wednesday. And that cast was really good. And the response down there, I remember feeling so happy for Jerry to get down there and see it, and for Stuart Oken, especially, to see it, because they went bananas.

The laughs were huge. It was all in Portuguese, but we all knew what they were saying, because we knew the script that well. And it was like a rock concert. It was unbelievable. A lot of that had to do with those actors, but it was just a hot show, and a big hit down there too. But again, that was that tour script, so it also had the benefit of that. It had the story.

[6:46] Steve Bebout: In a choreographic sense, what's so great about these roles, Gomez and Morticia, is that they certainly don't have to rest on star power, but they can. And for these international markets as well, they did. And so you would tailor make the movement. You would do that anyway for your leading ladies and leading man. However, it was such a joy, because you'd have a huge range of people that were verifiable movie stars in all these markets, and theater stars, and stage stars, and all different ways of having to kind of negotiate getting the best performance from them. I always found that really fun. I found facing off with the different Morticias and Gomez, and finding the best tango that we could create for them. So that would definitely change in each market.

[7:43] Mo Brady: You sat in the back of a lot of theaters watching audiences watch The Addams Family. How was the reaction different in these international markets compared to Broadway or the tour? Did it land in the same way?

[7:54] Steve Bebout: You know, it was all very different, to be honest. We streamlined a lot for the tour.

[8:00] Mo Brady: What do you mean by that? Like cutting dead air out of the script itself or the staging itself?

[8:04] Steve Bebout: Both, a bit of both. The way that the show developed, I think the way that the transitions happened, I think because we didn't have certain set pieces, a lot of the transitions could be shorter. And we had tempos that might have been a little bit faster. I think there were things for the tour that gave it a great lift. And it was pretty much a crowd pleaser, I felt, on the tour. I think New York audiences, as much as we love them, are very highly critical, can be a critical place. And rightly so. It's the birthplace of our musical theater genre. And we have to maintain very, very high standards. But I do think I'm going to go out on a limb and say I do feel like a national tour audience might be a little easier.

So a lot of the things that we experienced on the Broadway show, which was hard and challenging, a lot of growing pains, people come into the theater not knowing any of that. They have no judgments, no criticism, no history, no narrative. They're there just to enjoy the show. And I feel like the symbiosis of us getting some things right, a little bit more streamlined, and the audience coming in without any expectation, I think it just made it fly. Strangely, in Brazil and Mexico City were the most raucous audiences I've ever seen. It was one of the largest hits that Brazil has ever had, from what I know. And they have actually a really wide theatrical market there. So it was interesting. There was something about the show, I think the style of the show, I think the storytelling of the show, the kind of counterculture-ness of the show really spoke to them.

Marisa Orth, so she played Morticia in Brazil, amazing comedic actress, movie star, brilliant woman. She said this to me, now these are her words, we as Brazilians, you know, we already feel non-traditional. We already feel not like the Hollywood exports that we get. We already feel like we're dark people and passionate people. And these are the things she said to me. She said, so we already align with the Addams family immediately. We feel what it is to be an Addams because we are not the traditional Midwestern family. We have this life energy that really lends itself to the not normal. Now she may just be a little crazy and wonderful. She might be, but she's also an incredible performer. But that was her take, was that the Brazilians really just took to the music and the characters and the energy of how the Addams lived their lives.

You're talking about hometown heroes returning and being celebrated on a stage by a raucous audience of thousands. Whereas if you rewind to 2010, you've got people with their arms crossed because they read a Michael Riedel article that said that the show was bad. So it's like night and day in terms of how the audiences have been prepared to enter the space. And everything lent itself to the next stage. I'm not maligning one audience over another or saying that one experience was lesser or greater because it all kind of developed to the next stage.

[11:10] Mo Brady: In hearing how these international productions were basically identical to each other, one statement that Steve made stuck out to me. But so many of the jokes are still the same. Like if you pick up the script that they're doing in Oshkosh right now, you would know a lot of those jokes. Of course, we kept all the good ones. If these metaphorical productions in Oshkosh were the same as the national tour and the international productions, did they find the same success? Are amateur and stock productions of The Addams Family musical just as well-loved and well-received as the national tour? Well, that's what I'm going to find out next.

[12:05] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Steve Bebout and Dontee Kiehn for sharing their 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 there for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.