Review: The Addams Family is a Ghoulishly Good Time at The Mac-Haydn Theatre

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The production runs through June 21st in Chatham, NY

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With the recent Rocky Horror revival reminding everyone how much fun the macabre can be, how lucky is Columbia County to have its own creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky night out right there at the Mac-Haydn? The Addams Family has arrived in Chatham, and the troupe has done what it does best: built the perfect show to open the summer. It comes with a snap, a wink, a groan-worthy pun, and a hilarious embrace of death, darkness, and domestic dysfunction.

I know how that sounds. But every beloved ghoul is here. Thing, our handy friend, goes happily uncredited, as a disembodied hand should. Grace Mauldin’s Wednesday broods with an effortless cool, and boy, can she sing. Aryell Beaulieu-Shaffer, typecast for our benefit, looms and groans as Lurch, somehow making “hurry up” the funniest line of the night. Jack Holick’s Pugsley schemes with devilish glee, Carol Charniga’s Grandma cackles with giddy deception, and Jeffrey Jene’s Fester moons and swoons, the Fester we know and love.

The Beineke family turns up too as the “normal” foil, though in Addams-land, normal is the most suspicious thing a person can be. Will Forrest plays a spot-on Lucas, Steve Taylor a sturdy Mal Beineke, and the scene-stealing Erin Spears Ledford an Alice you won’t soon forget. And finally there are our favorites: the couple who took “till death do us part” as a mere suggestion. Madison Stratton ’s Morticia and Gabe Belyeu ’s Gomez, the latter a Mac-Haydn mainstay, bring all the gothic glamour and full-blooded romantic doom the roles demand. Each is delightfully demented alone; together they are a double whammy, embodying these lovers as if plucked straight from the cartoons and then the series.

The point here isn’t reinvention but celebration. The production revels in the world we love: the deathly double entendres, the gleeful inversion of family values, the conviction that love lives somewhere between a tango, a threat, and a funeral arrangement. The company knows exactly what it has and leans in, with brisk timing and a graveyard’s worth of charm.

“When You’re an Addams” sets the tone as the opening number: fast, funny, full of that strange Addams blend of family pride and cheerful morbidity. From the first snap, we’re in on the joke. One of the show’s cleverest devices is its ensemble of Addams ancestors, a chorus of departed relatives who haunt the stage and refuse to stay decorative. They give the evening its texture and a constant reminder that this family tree has roots buried six feet under.

Director Steve Edlund keeps things nimble, never lingering too long in any one crypt. The jokes land, the staging stays clean, and the tone holds exactly where it should: playful and just twisted enough. Edlund understands that the piece succeeds not as a heavy musical with a few gags but as theatrical nonsense played with absolute commitment.

Kaitlyn Frank ’s choreography turns the cast into a zombie prom, working the Mac-Haydn’s intimate boards with sly ingenuity. How she gets this many bodies moving this cleverly in that space is hard to fathom. They glide, slink, and spring to life, or afterlife, with comic precision, and the stage feels twice its size. Andrew Gmoser’s lighting conjures the weird, wacky palette of the television show many of us grew up on, while still giving it a theatrical life of its own.

The rest of the design team earns its bows too. Kurt Alger ’s costumes, Alvia Cross’s scenic design, and Sean McGinley ’s sound take a summer-stock budget and make it sing; the show looks and sounds far bigger than its means, and you never feel the stretch. And big kudos to Chloe Wiederhorn (props) and Summer McCormack (hair and makeup). The five musicians, meanwhile, somehow play like a band of sixteen, doing marvelous work under music director Connor Crotzer Scartascini and assistant Ethan Swanson. They give the score genuine lift and momentum without ever swallowing the singers. It is one of the pleasures of a Mac-Haydn night, the way the music keeps sounding larger than the pit that makes it.

Then there’s the feat behind the feat: the pace at which this theatre runs. Did you know they put one of these together in under two weeks? Much of the cast performs one show at night while rehearsing the next by day. They ought to sell tickets to that , the most astonishing production at the Mac-Haydn and the one almost no one gets to see.

That’s the old tradition of summer stock. For generations these theatres have been where performers, designers, musicians, and stage managers sharpen their craft through sheer speed and repetition: shows built fast, staged professionally, struck almost before the applause fades. It’s exhilarating and exhausting, and a great many artists who go on to Broadway and beyond learn their trade right here, under exactly this kind of pressure.

The Mac-Haydn, founded in 1969, is one of the Hudson Valley’s true treasures, not merely a place to see a show but one where talent is trained and an audience kept alive. In an age when so much entertainment is solitary and streamed, there’s something almost radical about sitting in a room full of strangers, laughing together at a family that finds its joy in gloom.

Special mention goes to Artistic Director John Saunders , who year after year leads a stellar team to a season this polished and this entertaining. All of it deserves to be celebrated and protected, because theatres like this cannot live on applause alone, much as they earn it. So let me be plain: buying a ticket is a fine start, but it is not enough. Buy a subscription. Make a donation. Keep that in mind the next time you’re in your seat watching a cast give everything, knowing they’ll be rehearsing the next show by morning. To support a place like the Mac-Haydn is to back its artists, its technicians, the young talent coming up, and the plain civic pleasure of a night out among neighbors.

Serious talk, maybe, for a show in which people sing about death, flirt with torture, and treat the family crypt like a sitting room. But that’s exactly it: great silliness takes exceptional skill, and the Mac-Haydn has it to spare. Consider, too, that the original television series ran a mere two seasons, and yet here we all are, decades on, still snapping along. To stay this cherished on so little is an achievement all its own.

Writing about The Addams Family takes restraint; the temptation to run away on a string of puns is nearly impossible to resist. So rather than bury you in them, I’ll let you conjure your own. Just get to the Mac-Haydn. This is one to wake the dead, and it does. There. I went there. So should you.

Learn more about the Mac-Haydn Theatre on their website here: machaydntheatre.org . This production runs through June 21, and there is plenty more worth subscribing for. Here is the rest of the season:

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/central-new-york/article/Review-The-Addams-Family-at-The-Mac-Haydn-Theatre-Conjures-a-Ghoulishly-Good-Time-20260615)._