Playing a ghoulish couple in a musical is nothing new for Nichole Kuehl and Robbie Marin.
Except this time Marin gets more lines.
“He talks so much,” said Kuehl, who plays Morticia Addams to Marin’s Gomez Addams in the Fort Gordon Dinner Theatre production of The Addams Family, which opens July 22.
Kuehl and Marin first appeared together in the Augusta Players production of “Young Frankenstein” in September 2021. She was the bride, and he was the monster.
Having worked together before helped them as they created the roles of the famously in-love Addams
“It did help that I knew him as a person already. I wasn’t timid or embarrassed,” she said. “We could trust each other.”
That trust allows them to play off each other in rehearsals and make creative suggestions in their performances.
Not only are they comfortable with one another, the duo also has something else vitally important to the characterization.
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“They have great chemistry,” said Mickey Lubeck, who is directing her first dinner theater show after choreographing many Fort Gordon shows over the years.
The musical rendition of The Addams Family is just one of the incarnations based on the characters created by cartoonist Charles Addams in the 1930s. Other adaptations have included the 1960s’ TV show and several films.
Two 1990s’ films and the actor who played in them helped shape Marin’s view of the role of Gomez Addams.
“Raul Julia — I loved him in ‘Street Fighter,’” he said. “His acting stood out to me.”
The fact that Julia was a Hispanic actor also impacted Marin.
The Addams Family musical first hit the Broadway stage in 2010, but according to a 2020 article in The New York Times, it was panned by the paper’s reviewer. Despite that, it stuck around for 20 months before finding its lifeblood in community and high school theaters across the country.
“It’s our best seller by volume of production,” said Steve Spiegel, the president and C.E.O. of Theatrical Rights Worldwide, which licenses the show in several formats, including a 30-minute version for elementary school performers, and is eyeing the possibility of a sequel by the same authors. “In the last five years, ‘Addams Family’ was the No. 1-produced high school show four of those years, and the other year it was No. 2,” according to the article.
The characters of Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Grandmama and Lurch as well as Wednesday and Pugsley are all in this musical rendering, but Wednesday and Pugsley aren’t the children you might remember. They are all grown up, and Wednesday has a boyfriend, whose family isn’t quite like hers. The meeting of the two families the catalyst for the plot.
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Adding to the fun is an ensemble of dead relatives, which according to Marin isn’t as creepy as it might sound.
“This is one of the funniest ensembles,” he said.
Marin’s first experience with a dead ensemble was in the Titanic musical. Actors playing dead bodies took various positions on the stage and only sat up when they were singing. That, he said, was bizarre.
But these ancestors “take it to the next level,” he said.
The Addams Family will be presented July 22-24 and July 29-31 at Fort Gordon Dinner Theatre, Building 32100, Third Avenue Fort Gordon. Shows on Friday and Saturday begin at 8 p.m. and are preceded by dinner. Sunday shows are matinees beginning at 3 p.m. with lunch prior.
Tickets range from $30-$55.
For reservations, call (706) 793-8552.
Charmain Z. Brackett is the managing editor of The Augusta Press. Reach her at charmain@theaugustapress.com
