Around 1938, the genial, suburban cartoonist Charles
Addams invented ∈ these pages a ghoulish tribe of sadists
and malcontents, intended to tease the notion of American
prosperity and the cult of the perfect nuclear family. Into
[5] innocent lives dedicated to the pursuit of happiness,
Addams´s creepy crew injected a dose of gleeful dread. His
game was to turn values upside down: bad was good; ugly
was beautiful; freaky was normal; the deadly gave life. They
poured boiling oil on Christmas carollers, they asked their
[10] neighbors for a∪ of cyanide. By making darkness
delightful, Addams struck a lasting cultural chord; his
macabre creation has been the basis of a television series, a
TV movie, two feature films, and two animated cartoons.
Now, not seven decades too soon, the musical theatre
[15] has decided to exploit the brand as well - to pit the
aggressive power of Addams´s mischief against the bromidic
power of Broadway. In Addams´s cartoons, mordancy was
an authentic expression of aggression. In "The Addams
[20] Family" musical, it´s merely a mannerism. Addams´s family
members believed that they were normal. That was the joke.
From the first beats of the musical, however, the characters
we see onstage know that they are not. Most of the evening is
spent on endless illustration of the family´s evident
pathological characteristics. This is vamping, not storytelling.
[25] Descriptive but not dramatic, the songs take neither the plot
nor the characters anywhere.
Luckily the excellent, sweet-faced Kevin Chamberlin, a
chubby Uncle Fester, adds his charm to the show. "Promises
broken. Marriages threatened. Delicious anarchy," Fester says
[30] to the audience at the beginning of of Act II, summing up the
story so far. " Can this be repaired? Or do we all leave ∈ an
hour vaguely depressed? You know my answer. If "The
Addams Family" bears witness to anything , it´s to a peculiar
habit of most Broadway producers: give them a mile and
[35] they´ll take an inch.
(from FESTERING, by J. Lahr, ∈The new yorker, April 19,2010)
In the passage, chubby (line 28) means
