Two Musicals, Two Families

No matter what the subject, musicals need to explore issues and themes everyone can relate to. Rick Elice, the co-writer of Broadway musicals The Addams Family and Jersey Boys (with Marshall Brickman), explains to Neil Litchfield about the stories connected with these two very different musicals.

As we sat in the stalls of Sydney’s Capitol Theatre during previews for The Addams Family, Rick Elice reflected on the differences and similarities between writing a show like Jersey Boys, where you have the songs around which to weave the show, and a more conventional book musical like The Addams Family.

“Jersey Boys is a show that’s based on real events, that happened to real people, who really lived and are still alive. That means you function first as a sort of a journalist. We sat with Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio and Tommy DeVito, and listened to them tell us their versions of things that happened to them over the 40 year period, and contradict each other and often-times contradict themselves.

“We realized we could present the show in four sections, because it’s sort of nifty that there’s four seasons, and the seasons of Mother Nature kind of follow the evolution of the group. Spring, to the full flower of success, which would be the Summer, to the dissolution of the original group, the Fall, to the Winter, in fact, of Frankie’s discontent. And in each of those seasons, we will assume that as they’re the narrator that they are telling the truth.

“Then the first thing that will happen when the narrative of the time has passed is that the next season who has that relationship with the audience will say, ‘Don’t listen to what he’s talking about, I’ll tell you what really happened.’ So it becomes an interactive game, almost, with the audience. You get to decide who to believe, or like us, you decide it’s not really important what the truth is, because it’s such a damned good story.”

Is there an element, rather than their stories being viewed as contradictory, as being the truth as seen through four different sets of eyes?

“Sure, in that kind of Rashomon way you’re watching four different perspectives that evolve over time. What we’re doing is telling the story of four guys who become a second family in this rock band they have, The Four Seasons. They become, in many ways, the way second families become in our real lives – it’s dysfunctional and wonderful. We screw things up like we do with our real family, and we have the same issues of wanting to be accepted, wanting to be respected, wanting to be loved and wanting to find a home.

“As dramatists, we realised that was universal. Everybody in the audience may not be anything like those four guys, trying to escape from the influence of the Mafia while making two and a half minute bubble-gum pop songs, while leading these very dark lives, but we’ve been through some version of what they’ve been through, so we can relate to them.

“The songs, of course, which existed 40 years before we wrote the show, are the reason why people come, but the story that was woven, in which the songs occur, seems to be the reason why people come back. You know those movie posters that say ‘based on a true story’, well it’s not just a true story, it’s a good story … and luckily for me and Marshall (Brickman) it’s an untold story. The specifics of their lives were never written about, and if they had been their records would never have been played, because in the 60s you couldn’t be in prison and on the radio at the same time. It just wasn’t cool. Nowadays that’s changed, but fortunately for us, as writers, the tragedy of their lives at the time, plus 40 years passing, it became the stuff of great musical theatre.”

Moving on, with the Australian production of The Addams Family playing at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre, we shifted to the making of the current show.

“With The Addams Family we’re not writing about real people or real events. We were given the characters from 150 or so cartoons that Charles Addams created for The New Yorker magazine from the late 1930s to the mid 1960s. Inside of those single frame cartoons are characters who have become famous for their characteristics, but they’re two dimensional because there’s just a frame of a cartoon in that magazine. But nothing ever comes before that frame and nothing ever comes after. It has a great little joke in it, then you turn the page and you’re on to something else. There’s never any consequences. There’s no logic necessary to the telling of a one-frame story, and if you try to apply any logic to it, your brain starts to implode like an old grapefruit. The producers said, take these characters and breathe a third dimension into them for the theatre, which is good, because we’re charging three-dimensional prices, so it has to be a real show which has to be able to connect, so find a story to tell.

When You're An Addams

“The first thing we found was that while the Addams Family may strike us on the surface as being very macabre, bizarre people, they’re really very much like people we know, like the strange cousin or the bachelor uncle who shows up once a year at Christmas, or the ultra-violent kid who can only play video games and texts 24 hours a day.

“We can recognize these characters today, almost more than ever before. That family pushes our reality just a little bit, and it’s great for the theatre because we get to see it from a distance.

“The great similarity between Jersey Boys and The Addams Family – what we discovered writing about these four Roman Catholic first generation Italian boys in the States was that they were a family, whereas the Addams Family is a quintessential family. It’s kind of a wonderful thing to write about - connection, acceptance, continuity and ritual that keeps all of our families together.”

How did the extended story of Wednesday falling in love and the Bieneke Family visiting come about?

“One thing about the Addams Family is that they have never changed. They look exactly the same as they did when they first appeared in 1937. That’s the sort of thing that can only happen in a cartoon. It can’t happen in real life. We know that theatre, as life, only becomes interesting with conflict. You need conflict, you need turmoil, you need dischord.

“In order to have dischord in a family that never changes, you need to have something change. So we picked one thing, which is Wednesday has grown up and she’s fallen in love with a ‘normal’ boy. This comes as something of a shock to the other members of her family, because they’ve always seen themselves as being perfectly normal. Emotionally, of course, it’s that moment in the life of every parent when they realize their kids are starting to grow up.  

“Also, introducing the boy and his family into the story, they become stand-ins for us. They crack the family open and everything seems to go wrong. Why? Because the daughter Wednesday does something which we’ve all done, or had done to us; she goes to her father and says, ‘Daddy, I have to tell you something, but I don’t want you to tell mummy.’ At that moment he is caught in a trap which there’s no success for - you’re either going to break your kid’s heart, or get your wife really pissed off with you, probably both. The girl, by asking her father to keep a secret for her, that she’s in love, and to get the father’s help to keep them together, inadvertently drives a wedge between this husband and wife, Gomez and Morticia, who have always been one unit – they have been emotionally so caught up with each other from the very first time we’ve seen them. They’re highly sensual, highly sexualized, a very-hot-for-each-other husband and wife, even after all these years. That kind of conflict is the kind of thing you can build the show around.”

Images: (top) The Addams Family - Australian cast (Lightbox Photography), (middle) Rick Elice and (lower) Jersey Boys - 2013 Ausrtralian cast (Photographer: Jeff Busby).

Originally published in the May / June edition of Stage Whispers.

Musicals in 2013 and Beyond