Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

• 205 W. 46th Street
• New  York, NY 10036
• (212) 575-9200
• Website

I got a baseball game.  J gets Broadway.  Well, that’s the way I’m gonna state it anyway.  Actually, she was very excited about the baseball game as was I about getting to see a play on Broadway.   Officially though, the game was for me and the play was for her.  🙂

I gave J complete control over which play she wanted to see.  There’s not a ton on Broadway right now that I really want to see.  Cats has long closed and we’ve already seen Wicked.  She didn’t have to look long until she found Nathan Lane’s current project.

In 2001, J and her mom took a trip to New York and saw Nathan Lane in The Producers.  I’ve seen both the movie and the traveling show, but J was lucky enough to see the show with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.  She loved Nathan Lane’s Max Bialystock and wanted to see him in a new role.

That new role is as Gomez Addams in The Addams Family which is playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street just west of Times Square.  The theater opened 100 years ago as The Globe.  It operated for about 20 years hosting dramas and musicals before being converted to a movie theater in the 1930’s.  In the late 1950’s, the place was gutted and reopened in 1958 as the Lunt-Fontanne in honor of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Our tickets were for the 7:00 show on Tuesday night.  We just had our tickets held at will call, so the first thing we did was make our way inside the lobby and find the will call.  After getting our tickets, we had to walk back outside and go through a different door in to the same lobby where our tickets were scanned.

We were ushered up a flight of stairs to the second level where we were told the house would open in about 15 minutes.  That gave us both a chance to hit the restrooms and take a look at some of the merchandise being hawked from a couple makeshift stands.  There were also some small drink stands selling water, pop, and beer which could actually be taken in to the theater.  I considered a bottle of water, but passed because of the price.

It wasn’t quite 15 minutes later when the house opened and since our tickets were in the mezzanine, we trekked up another flight of stairs to get to the top balcony.

We were met by one usher who looked at our tickets and pointed us to the middle of the seating area where another usher pointed us up the stairs to yet another usher who took us to our seats and handed us the playbill.  Our seats were in the lowest price range so we were about three rows from the top.  They were still $75, but we were able to see just fine.

The theater filled up pretty quickly and by show time, the house was full.  For being such an old theater, the seats were actually fairly comfortable.  There wasn’t much leg room, but the seats were wide enough that we were both comfortable and didn’t feel like we were sitting on top of the person next to us.

The show, surprisingly, was hilarious.  I was a little hesitant because The Addams Family has never appealed to me whether it was the TV show or one of the movies.  I’ve just never really gotten in to it.  The story was a completely original story and not something culled from any previous incarnations.

As expected, Nathan Lane was hilarious.  His timing is perfect and he took some pretty bland jokes and made them sidesplitting funny.

The show lasted about three hours with a fifteen minute intermission.  We were both happy with the experience and loved the fact that we got to see the show with an almost original cast (Bebe Neuwirth was on vacation so we got the understudy).  It was my first Broadway show and I was excited about that.  Just another thing I can now say that I’ve done.