It's arduous enough directing a massive Broadway musical like The Addams Family, but Julian Crouch tackled three roles at once: co-director, scenic designer and costume designer. "I actually handled some of the puppets as well, but it's like a hidden credit," he adds with a laugh. "I come from a small theatre company, so I often have to do everything. I look back and think, ‘Wow, that was a lot to say that I would do.'" But he pulled it off. Crouch and his directing partner, Phelim McDermott, became known here for their 2005 production of the delightfully twisted musical Shockheaded Peter, an off-Broadway hit that imbued macabre German children's folk tales with Expressionist sets. It became the calling card that landed the duo the Addams gig.
The twosome's Indie fringe theatre background in England, which involved "a lot of mask work and puppetry work and very visual things," was something that attracted producer Stuart Oken, who was one of the original producers of The Lion King. "He was used to putting experimental artists together in a more commercial structure," notes Crouch. "I think he knew what he was getting into, and that he was asking for something a little bit different."
Ooky and Spooky
The Addams Family on Broadway straddles the line between the ooky, spooky humor of the original cartoons with the razzle-dazzle expected of the Great White Way. The story walks that same line between twistedness and normality as the Addams Family world gets turned upside down after Wednesday falls for a young man from an uptight Midwestern family. The other family soon comes to visit our Goth protagonists in their Central Park mansion. Will the Addams universe survive this unexpected union with the normal world? The whole show was a tricky balancing act, and after Crouch and McDermott brought the show to Chicago, veteran Broadway director Jerry Zaks tweaked it for New York. But given that Crouch had an investment in other areas of the show, he was along for the ride, design-wise, in Manhattan.
When one thinks of the multitasking talents of Crouch, the main question is whether he could handle it all effectively and efficiently. "Having great associates is the main thing," he declares, praising the talents and teams behind design associate Frank McCullough, costume associate MaryAnn Smith and puppeteer Basil Twist. "I had fantastic support." McDermott was the main director in their two-man team, and he offered support to Crouch in his design endeavors. While the former is the main director and the latter the designer, the lines admittedly did get blurred a bit during the production process.
As if working on The Addams Family was not enough, the dynamic duo of Crouch and McDermott were also doing Punch & Judy for the Metropolitan Opera. "It was kind of like rowing up the Amazon," quipped Crouch. "They're different tribes. They're both high-powered and fantastic at what they do, but totally different rules and totally different customs. In a way, you're in a tribal situation [thinking about] how to survive the Broadway tribe and the Met Opera tribe. To be honest it was like anthropology. My antidote to The Addams Family at the end of the day was to take on Punch and Judy, which was a tiny little setup with building things out of my house. When you do a Broadway show, you have the unions, systems of work and a lot of vetting stages; script readings and workshops and things that, where I come from, you can't really afford. You have a month to get a show on, and that's it. You have to live with it, whatever it's like. This was an intense experience in many ways. Sometimes it was very difficult, sometimes it was absolutely fantastic. I learned a huge amount doing it, but it was incredibly challenging as well. It was a very different game than anything I've done before."
Design Before Script
The sets were mostly made of steel or aluminum frame clad with wood, and in a few cases canvas. The three main setups included Addams house interiors (with different staircase set-ups and sliding walls helping to create the foyer, dining room, master bedroom, hallway and dungeon); the exteriors featuring the house facade in Central Park along with a giant tree outside (and the family crypt at the start and end of the show); and the roof setup for a sequence where Gomez and Morticia tango in front of the family.
"The same [set] pieces were being used in different ways in each scene," states Crouch. "There were two big swinging walls that opened up a bit like the flippers of a pinball machine. When they're completely back, we're outside for the graveyard or underneath the family tree. When they're completely in, it's like an anonymous space, like the original cartoon. There's a picture down in this corner, or a picture on that wall. Using the curtains and that flat wall was kind of a no man's land that I used to setup the early stages.
"We went in and really got some things right and really got some things wrong, but generally with the set we were smart enough to put a kit together so that during the changes that were made at various points, we always had a new configuration that we could go to," Crouch adds. "I think we cut a bed from the show, and I think we added one entranceway that the ancestors come out of, but those were the only two changes [between Chicago and New York]. Massive changes were made to the script and the running order, but that little kit survived all the way through. It looks like a big set, but it was fairly economic for those things. We weren't throwing out scenery and building new scenery at the last minute."
Crouch also dealt with an unusual situation on The Addams Family: he was designing before there was a finished script. "In some ways, it allows you to leave the process to a certain extent," he says. "What was hard was, I really wanted to see the outside of the Addams Family house, because if people don't see it, they'll feel robbed, so it was a challenge to try to get that into the show. The whole design with the flipper walls was me holding back the full reveal of the house before the strangers walk up to the house, so for 20 minutes of that show, I had to hold back a proper set [before we went back outside]."
Winging It
Crouch adds that just riding the many layers of opinion was hard. "You can become a bit stupid when you have people saying what's right and what's wrong; you get to a stage where you can lose a sense of your own opinion. That was a challenge – to hold on and have faith in my own decisions. I had some big battles. A year before we opened in Chicago, I had a big battle to keep my vision of what the show looks like. Then there was the challenge of not having any space in the wings."
The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre has minimal wing space, which is different from the touring theatres in which Crouch has been accustomed to working. "I'm used to things coming in pieces fast, or being built in kit form, and normally you would have space in the wings," he explains. "But there, you had a matter of feet in the wings, so I had to be taught by fantastic production managers that things went off stage and had to get flown up and things collapse in strange ways, so that the gates fold into three and then fly up. You have a huge challenge in those theatres. It's the same with the West End as it is on Broadway. They were built at a time when people just flew in backdrops really. So I would say maybe 80 percent of the creativity was actually in how to collapse things and get them stored back stage. The audience will never know or see that, but that's really where a lot of the challenges were."
While the show originally had no trap doors, one was installed in New York when Zaks decided that the Addams ancestors, rather than appearing from the portraits on the walls, were to become ghostly figures that arose from the family crypt at the start of the show. There was not much scenery that came up through the floor, which helped to keep costs down. The two giant staircases that often dominate the stage (one wraps around the back, the other connects in front for the dungeon set) also take up a lot of space. In the few instances where they are not onstage, they are wheeled into the wings or stored in different places. "They make things very tight backstage," says Crouch. "Each of the two staircases break into two parts, but most of the time they're used in some configuration on stage."
Psycho House
The designer adds that lighting designer Natasha Katz was a big part of his world in the show. "We worked closely together, because as a designer, you should work closely with your lighting designer. They can make your mediocre work look great. The lighting is so crucial, especially with something that's Gothic."
In designing the sets for the show, Crouch chose to go back to Charles Addams' original cartoons. Some fans are less familiar with the cartoons and better acquainted with the subsequent television series and/or movies, however, so Crouch also took time to check those out as well. Ultimately, the designer wanted to follow his own path while paying homage to all of those predecessors.
"Really you want people to think, ‘That's what the Addams Family house looks like'," says Crouch. "That's what you're trying to capture, so in a sense you're tapping into the popular memory of something. The Addams Family had a huge inspiration on the haunted house genre, certainly what people in America think of as a haunted house, although it gets mixed up with the house in Psycho in people's heads; so you're tapping into popular consciousness, really."
Stripping It Down
Unlike the television series, Crouch chose not to clutter the set with too many quirky props. He wanted to help keep the musical moving quickly, so for inspiration he stayed with the original cartoons, "which are actually quite spare," he notes. "[Addams] didn't put anything in the picture that didn't help with the punch line. So I stripped things down. I was aware of what was happening with the TV show, and likewise with the films. For my sense, this is closer to the films than the TV series, but only by chance, really."
In terms of costume design, Crouch once again found inspiration in the cartoons, and he gave the newly invented Beineke clan from Ohio a funny, yet classic, Middle America look. (Alice Beineike's bright yellow dress offers a colorful contrast to the darkly-shrouded Addams clan.) What excited him the most was the chance to change the costumes of the ancestors, whom Zaks wanted to make look ghoulish and to emerge from the Addams family crypt. It was a change that Crouch approved of.
"I went and redesigned every piece of costume to look more ghostly, and we put in a new piece of scenery," recalls Crouch. " I really loved doing that. I have far more experience with scenic design than costume design. I was nervous about the costume design, and I was saved by the fantastic team around me. But it was very exciting for me personally to go back and have another go at those costumes, and there was obviously a big change in the makeup as well, because they went from living ancestors to very, very dead ancestors. A lot more white came into the palette, and that went fantastically. I think along with wig designer Tom Watson, we made a really strong look for that, and made a great contrast to the main characters."
To touch upon the puppet work that Crouch revealed earlier, the giant squid was a focal point of one key scene in Act II. The designer says that every ensemble and crew member operates the colossal creation. "The actors are also the puppeteers, and they're in the body of the squid. For most of the squid arms, there is a rope or line going up that supports the full weight. There's a crew member on the end of those, so everyone in the theatre is struggling to get that together for that minute and a half."
The ultimate look of The Addams Family musical speaks to the hard work that Crouch and his collaborators put into the production. While some people have debated why the uncredited Zaks was brought on for the New York incarnation – some posit that it was to make the show more mainstream and less quirky, especially given its source material – Crouch remains positive about the experience, even as he acknowledges that the road from Chicago to New York was hard because of the chorus of voices all wanting to be heard. The designer took this show as an opportunity to challenge and stretch himself – in the figurative sense, of course.
"Shockheaded Peter was a great success, and it's actually quite hard, once you have had success, to follow that up," Crouch muses. "Everybody wants the same thing, and you don't want to do the same thing. In some ways, when something goes wrong, there's more to learn from the mistakes than there is from the successes. In some ways, I think that's the way to persevere, to treat your successes and your failures as the same, and look at them and think what you can learn here. Don't believe your bad reviews or your good reviews. Keep your eye on what you're doing."
