When I have friends in town, I like to do things that, as a resident, I don’t normally have the opportunity to do. My good friend and former college roommate Mallory is in town for the weekend before she departs for Taglit-Birthright Israel and we decided that while she was in town, we should see something on Broadway.
Before I moved, I visited New York in January 2010 with my sister, and we saw South Pacific at Lincoln Center. It was good, and cheap ($20 for student pricing), but I fell asleep and lost a pin that I got from my grandmother, so I was very much in favor of having a better experience at the theater.
We bought tickets a few days ahead of time for the 8 p.m. performance of The Addams Family at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. For orchestra seats (row K, seats 109 and 110), we paid $146 each. We had an amazing view of the show, and paid almost $100 less for our seats than the rest of the orchestra section.
I was surprised by the mixed reactions that I heard prior to seeing the show, as I thought it was really well done. I’m a big fan of the movie series, and classic television series, so when I heard they were making a musical, I was skeptical. The music, however, was hysterical and, with the exception of the boy who played Pugsley and Brooke Shields, really well sung. That said, the acting, including Shields’ performance, was amazing. I could not stop laughing. The comedy in the show was definitely intended for an older audience — several jokes and references to the Hippie era, sex/sexuality, and marriage.
If you’re in the mood for a show that beats to its own drum, I highly recommend The Addams Family.