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One of the big numbers in The Addams Family Musical is "Full Disclosure," a song that reveals secrets and drives the action of the rest of the show, and it's a song that we had a lot of fun with during early rehearals. It became a joke early on, when someone would say something awkward or a little too true, we would say #fulldisclosure, and we'd laugh. For a while, we even maintained a full disclosure sticky note board, where we would have fun writing down the silly things that happened during rehearsal. I will say that these have been the most enjoyable rehearsals I've had in years. This cast has approached the material with the sense of levity required for musical comedy, and the camaraderie I've experienced with my stage managers has been, to borrow a phrase from across the pond, "spot on."

This musical, for me, has been too long coming, because I've enjoyed the Addams Family for a long, long time, though I have to confess, when I was a kid, I was more of a Munsters person. The broad comedy of that series appealed to my simpler sense of humor, I suppose. John Astin's Groucho Marx-like wit passed right over my younger self's sense of humor, as did other classics like the Marx Brothers themselves. Fred Munster running through a wall or the Three Stooges bopping each other on the head were more cartoon-like, and I was a Saturday morning cartoon kid from the earliest times I can remember.

With age, I came to understand that The Addams Family truly was an adult show. There was silly humor, and a lot of it, but hand-in-hand came quick witticisms that I never understood as a kid. It was quirky, alongside the whole creepy, kooky, mysterious, and ooky stuff. I mean, a leg sticking out of a swordfish mouth? Who thought of that? A shark, maybe, but that wouldn't be funny, right? It's the odd, the unexpected that makes The Addams Family so special, and that's what makes them so relevant today, in a time when two world leaders can compare the size of their nuclear arsenals on Twitter and companies grow ever-more concerned with who belongs in what bathroom. Add in the amazing ways we can connect with each other instantly through social media and the fact that it's only isolating us further from each other as we stare at our screens and forget that there are hundreds of amazing things we're passing by as we attempt to create the perfect 140...wait...280 word Tweet. Today's society may be creepy and ooky, but it's definitely lost its sense of kooky.

If I could ask you to take anything home with you after the show today, it would be this: don't judge a person by clothes or hair, or her love of a crossbow. In fact, don't judge at all, because you don't know the story of a person based on what he or she is dressed in today. We are all in the midst of transition, and the guy wearing all dark clothes and eyeliner, refusing to make eye contact with you in the halls or in the office may just be in the process of discovering things about himself he's never known. Those things my lead him to discover the cure for cancer, or to buy a coat for a homeless man on the street, or even become a high school math teacher. You know they've all gone through that heavy eyeliner phase. Or possibly, he's just a member of an interesting clan who happens to love the color black, enjoy a little torture just for fun, and make it a habit to dance with their husbands and wives to remind them that connection is what life is really all about.

So get a witch's shawl on, a broomstick you can crawl on, we're gonna make a call on The Addams Family (snap snap)!! Enjoy.