THE stage musical version of the Addams Family, the lovable clan of vampires, monsters, ghouls, witches, and goths created by cartoonist Charles Addams, just eats you up alive. The experience cannot be recommended too highly.

Leigh Operatics’s production, in the masterful hands of director Sallie Warrington, is quite brilliantly inventive, but director and cast are working with strong material from the start. The show is funny, tuneful, and fast paced , adding up to one hundred per cent proof entertainment.

The characters may be twisted, but the plotline could hardly be simpler. Wednesday, the daughter of the family, falls in love with an ordinary mortal boy from an ultra conventional Midwest family. Mum and dad come to dinner, not knowing what is about to hit them. The experience proves life – or, this being the Addams family – death, changing Okay, so the intellectual content may not require a PhD in drama, but as Gomez says, in one of many great gag lines: “What I lack in depth I make up for in shallowness.” The laughter, indeed, is almost non-stop. Beware, in particular, of the killer line about windmills in old master paintings.

The cast are actually faced with a major challenge. They have to make the monstrous characters likeable and, in a odd way, believable, but not lurch into cartoon caricature. This they accomplish impeccably. Neil Lands plays the Spanish aristo Gomez so well that the Spanish government should give him a real life gong. Helen Sharp, who always turns even the most minor of roles into gold, is delectable as his wife, Morticia. Peter Brown as the lowering butler Lurch, and Barry Jones as Uncle Fester also put on a fantastic show. Laura Hurrell, as the prim Midwest mum who undergoes a sizzling transformation, threatens to steal the show for long periods.

Chief honours, though, must go to director-choreographer Sallie Warrington, for her endless creativity in the staging, and her pulsating dance numbers (particularly the second act tango and the sweet ditty The Moon and Me). Her use of video graphics (by Drew Seal), which includes an animated moon and Thing, the scuttling, disembodied hand, is also stunning.

The Addams Family is due its West End debut in the near future. If they have any sense, they will simply transfer LODS’s production straight to the London stage.

The Addams Family is at 7.30 nightly at the Palace theatre, Westcliff, until Saturday. Matinee, Saturday, 2.30pm.