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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: Following the journey of The Addams Family has been surprising, to say the least. Before I started, I wasn't even sure the original creative team would want to go on record with me about the show's tumultuous development. And yet, their gracious excitement to jump back into the world of The Addams Family showed me something that I hadn't experienced as a member of the Broadway cast: many people like the show. First and foremost on that list was book co-author Rick Elice, who enjoyed getting his hands dirty as he wrote and rewrote the book to uncover clearer and more specific obstacles for his characters. Also on that list were Dontee Kiehn and Steve Bebout, who, after closing the Broadway and national tours, went on to stage many, many well-received productions of the musical around the globe. And then there were those who are mounting the show now, the teachers and students creating Little Addams Families of their own across the country.

[1:29] Mo Brady: I wasn't expecting to end this series speaking to high school teachers. After all, we in the Broadway industry often believe that the productions we mount are the superior versions of the material. Yes, shows can have popular, amateur, and regional lives, but they would all pale in comparison to the original production. Yet, for The Addams Family, I was starting to think this wasn't the case. After I'd asked my prepared interview questions to Rockridge High School theater teacher, Rebekah Hess, I started to tell her about my podcast mini-series as a whole. And in that conversation, I realized something about The Addams Family I hadn't been able to put into words before.

[2:10] Mo Brady: So, it's been really fun. This is actually probably my last interview for the series, although I'll let you know when it comes out. I'm really excited about this sort of final step. I wasn't anticipating talking about student productions, but it just kind of led me here, and it's been really fun to be able to do.

[2:28] Rebekah Hess: Yeah, thanks so much for interviewing me. I was really excited when I got your email. It was awesome.

[2:33] Mo Brady: Sure. And I love the connection, you know, that we're all sort of like working on the same piece, I think is really beautiful, you know.

[2:39] Rebekah Hess: Yeah, it's awesome.

[2:40] Mo Brady: You did it in 2017, which is, what, eight, nine years after the workshops and the pre-Broadway tryout, and yet there's a connective tissue between all of those things. And sort of building that connective tissue, I think, is really beautiful.

[2:54] Rebekah Hess: It's like everyone who gets to work on it contributes something of their own, and just kind of keeps building the story, even if not everybody involved gets to see that, you know. It's just fun to participate with others.

[3:07] Rebekah Hess: What's so interesting about The Addams Family is those initial productions were not so well received, and yet there's been this snowball effect of now, when it's done in a high school, kids are excited to do it. It's the most popular show, you know. It is a great show. The experience people have with the show now is so much better than the experience that people had with the show in its infancy, which I think is sort of the opposite of how things usually go. You think about, like, Hamilton, and you think about the original Broadway cast, and nothing will ever compare to that original Broadway cast. And yet, somehow, The Addams Family has been the opposite.

[3:59] Mo Brady: I should clarify something about this newly budding theory of mine. I don't mean to imply that the performances or the design or the musicians are better in these amateur productions than what we saw on Broadway. The legendary actors who originated and were placed in these roles are theatrical titans, ones who have given remarkable performances in countless shows, including The Addams Family. But what these subsequent productions did better than ours is they found the joy in The Addams Family. They found the family in The Addams Family. And in that way, they surpassed what we were able to create at the Lunt-Fontanne. These reasons that actors and audiences now love the show make sense. But as original associate director Steve Bebout and I spoke about, these characteristics were developed after the fact. They weren't a consideration during the show's development.

[4:52] Mo Brady: It's funny because when I reverse engineer myself into why this show is so popular, particularly with schools, I can find so many entry points. It is a show with a very wide cast that you can make very small or very big. It is based on intellectual property that every generation has some sort of experience with. It has a young woman at the lead of it who is feeling other, right? It is all about inclusion and acceptance. It digs into the worlds of being weird is a good thing. Every ensemble member gets to have their own character. There's one set. There's one costume per person. You can just see all of the reasons why it works. Multiple principals too, they get to have their moments. Well, you know, Jeff's a senior this year.

We really got to get him something meaty. Get the basketball player to play Lurch and he's just got, it's going to be fine. And the kid whose voice hasn't dropped to play Pugsley, like it's all there. So when I think about why this musical is so popular, especially among student productions, it makes sense. And yet I cannot imagine in any way that any of those things were on your minds when you were just trying to create a thing.

[6:03] Rebekah Hess: Yeah, no, I don't think so at all. It's funny too because I remember thinking about it on Something Rotten and maybe that's because I'm just, I'm a little older and maybe just slightly more savvy. And I remember thinking, man, they're going to do this at so many high schools. They can incorporate the Shakespeare stuff, musical theater history, and it's a great teaching tool. But no, I don't remember anyone talking about the licensing of the show. I do remember a feeling of pride and a little Steph Curry swagger after a three-point shot when the stats started coming out about The Addams Family and how many productions had been done. In its first year in license, I believe it was the most produced work in the country.

And I just felt so good for the writers. Those guys were wonderful to me. I was a young guy and they treated me with such respect and I kind of get emotional. They were wonderful people and they were wonderful to me. And to see that work just go out there and make people happy, it's great. It's what they wanted it to do. And it got to do it without the business of Broadway. If that show's biggest success is found in high schools and community theaters, and it's the first show that a bunch of people say they did, that's just great. What a gift for those writers.

[7:20] Mo Brady: One thing I thought about is more kids walk out of high school knowing the lyrics to "When You're an Addams" than "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning."

[7:28] Rebekah Hess: I think you're probably right. You're probably right. It's just weird when women sing "Pulled" or girls sing "Pulled" and like these songs because they've anchored themselves in those people at such a young age. Do you know is it's year after year, right? It's still the most produced.

[7:43] Mo Brady: When I asked writer Rick Elice about the show's late found popularity, he wasn't surprised that the material had found a responsive audience in young people.

[8:02] Rick Elice: These Addams Family characters say and do really outrageous things and behave in really outrageous ways. I mean, they are the Addams Family after all. And so it's a lot of fun to play characters like that. Fun is a good thing to have when you're doing a play, especially when you're doing a play in school. They are outrageous and the social contract sort of doesn't exist for them. So you get to have an experience of what it's like to be able to break all the rules and there be no penalty for it. Only applause. There's only reward for it. And that's why it's fun to do. I mean, that's why we got, you know, even originally we got a cast, Nathan Lane and B.B. Neuwirth and Terry Mann and Carolee Carmelo and Jackie Hoffman and Kevin Chamberlain.

We didn't kidnap their children and hold them hostage to make them do it. They all wanted to do the show. You know, they all said yes to doing The Addams Family. That's because what they read and heard of the score convinced them that this would be something that they wanted to do. You know, the vicissitudes of launching a big show with, you know, complicated personalities. But, you know, once you joined, everything seemed to work out great. You know, people would have fun. And I know that, you know, I know that Roger and Brooke and they had such a wonderful time. I mean, Roger came home every night from that theater really, really happy. You know, and it was just like a happy cast doing a, you know, doing a show on Broadway.

And I thought, this is great. You know, once the reviews are old, it's possible for a show to really come, you know, come back to itself, snap back into being the thing that it was always meant to be. And that certainly did happen on Broadway. If that hadn't happened, we probably, you know, that little group of us that went on to refashion the show, we probably wouldn't have had the, you know, the moxie to do it.

[10:19] Rick Elice: Why do you think the show works in so many different languages and so many different venues with students? That's the thing that always gets me to see kids dressed up as Pugsley or a conquistador ancestor. Like, I love seeing the legacy of the show.

[10:40] Rick Elice: That's the easy question. I think it's because at its heart, the show is about a kid going to her parents and saying, look, I don't care how you did it. I don't care if I'm breaking your rules. I'm in love with this person. And this is my life. And this is my rules. And I'm going to do it my way. That's the way it's going to have to be. And you're going to have to wrap your head around that. I'm going to move toward my darkness. And I'm going to love my love, my way of loving. And that's a statement that I think every single kid makes to their parents at some point in their lives. And everyone in the world has been a kid at some point. The show has that universal thing going for it, which I'd like to say we were smart enough to have planned and done deliberately.

But I think, you know, in that way, that's the way that art happens. And sometimes you don't quite know where you're going. You just are going in a direction. So of course, they love to play that, because they get to live vicariously through the characters in the show. And maybe some of them will, you know, be able to have that conversation with their parents in real life, because they were in The Addams Family. I'm not trying to get heavy or anything. That's why theater is so great, because theater goes, oh, I see, that's how you can do it. Theater gives alternatives to people, you know, how to live their lives. Even musical comedy can do that.

[12:02] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Steve Bebout, Rick Ellis, and Rebekah Hess 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 for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.