Addams family is hardly your typical American family

 After the orchestra plays the bouncy first four notes of the overture, the audience responds with two claps. Thus begins Palo Alto Players’ musical production of “The Addams Family.”

The Addams family is hardly your typical American family. Instead everyone dresses in all black and revels in the macabre. For example, it visits the graveyard to interact with its ancestors.

The affable Uncle Fester (Dylan Stanley) is in love with the moon. Grandma (Barbara Heninger) has a pet rat and an array of potions.

The butler, Lurch (David Murphy), never speaks and never changes his expression.

The younger child, Pugsley (Jackson DuBois), enjoys being tortured. The older child, Wednesday (Astraea Parker Brown), wears a perpetual pout.

However, Wednesday has a serious boyfriend, the earnest young Lucas (Mark Kanazawa), and they want to get married.

Hoping to win both sets of parents’ blessing, Wednesday invites Lucas’s mother, Alice (Samantha Kembrandt) and father, Mal (Richard Portune), to dinner and pleads with her family to act normal.

Wednesday confides their plans to her father, Gomez (Tony Gonzales), but gets him to promise not to tell her mother, Morticia (Kyle Abucay).

Of course the dinner is disastrous, but eventually everything works out for the best.

Director Janie Scott, who choreographed Palo Alto Players’ 2015 production of the show, has assembled an excellent ensemble cast with everyone creating the characters intended by the show’s writers, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.

The singing of Andrew Lippa’s music and lyrics is good with leadership by musical director Christine Lovejoy. The cast also excels in Michael Saenz’s choreography.

Design elements add to the show’s creepy elements with the set by Kevin Melendez-Davies, whose skeletal trees flank the stage, accented by Samantha Schroeter’s lighting. Costumes by Nolan Miranda help to define the characters. For example, the 11 ancestors wear garb reflecting the times when they lived.

The sound is by Dan Holland, but he can’t conquer the acoustics of Lucie Stern Theater. Through several shows, I have found that the sound on the far left and right sides is mushy, making it difficult to understand speech and lyrics. People seated nearby have commented on the sound, too.

Otherwise, the show is well done and fun.

Running about two and a half hours with an intermission, “The Addams Family” will continue through Nov. 15 at the Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto.

For tickets and information, call (650) 329-0891 or visit www.paplayers.org.