Every so often a show comes along that makes you go, “Okay, I don’t care whether or not it’s good, I’ve got to see this.” For me, the new Addams Family musical was one of these. My New York people and I saw it earlier this month and to my delight not only were Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth and Jackie Hoffman onstage that night,  but Terrence Mann, the original Broadway Rum Tum Tugger and creator of Leon Czolgoz in Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” was in it too, and they and the rest of the cast, notably Kevin Chamberlin as Uncle Fester and Morgan James, the understudy who played Wednesday the night we saw it, just knocked it out of the park.

This is one of those shows that nobody likes except the audience, and I can see how someone who pays attention to structure and form in a theater piece could be unhappy with it. The production was originally staged by creators of the avant-garde British musical “Shockheaded Peter” (which tragically canceled its off-Broadway run a month before attendees of the 2005 PeterCon were supposed to see it.) Their version of the show apparently didn’t sit well with preview audiences, so the Shockheaded Peter team was taken off the project and more conventional American talents were brought in to make it more accessible. The resulting show isn’t really like the original Charles Addams cartoons or their TV and movie adaptations but a  hybrid mutant. Though on the surface meretricious and commonplace, it has a seductive underlay of surrealism periodically revealed  in vignettes of irrational ecstacy, as when Uncle Fester does his aerial dance with the moon or a repressed Middle American businessman (played  with authentic rigidity by Mann) rediscovers his passion for his neglected wife after being raped by a giant squid.

My sister said she was glad that Nathan Lane put on such a good show for us (the night she saw him in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” he was just phoning it in.) I was just grateful for his being Gomez. Giving Gomez his searing Irish-American tenor and Hanna-Barbera face  takes that character one step further away from origins that make me a little uncomfortable.

Charles Addams told Peter Lorre that the cartoon character we now know as Gomez was supposed to be a fusion of Peter and New York politician Thomas Dewey.  All right, everybody’s entitled to their own interpretation of Peter. But tell me who you think looks like Gomez.

Here’s Peter.

Here’s Dewey.

And here’s Gomez with his family.

The eyes and the height are Peter’s, but the turned-up nose, the Twenties style hair with the middle parting, the thick, abbreviated moustache, and double-breasted pinstriped power suit are all Dewey. Note also that the square head and wide, clumsy cylindrical body are also distinctly non-Peterian. Even at his heaviest Peter’s distinctive bone structure gave a virile, dynamic V shape to his face and body. Neither does the rodentlike little mouth bear any resemblance to Peter’s full-lipped, frequently cigarette-filled orifice. And that nose again–I’m sorry but that is just not a Jewish nose. Even Jews who get nose jobs don’t ask for noses like that.

What is Peterlike about him? Well, the eyes, and the height in proportion to other characters. Plus the attraction to statuesque dark-haired beauties. You could costume and make up any of Peter’s wives as Morticia and they’d pass. As a tall, dark woman I kind of like that. But John Astin’s portrayal of Gomez on the “Addams Family” TV series always skeeved me out. I couldn’t bear to watch him kissing Carolyn Jones’ hand and all the way up her arm.  It just didn’t seem right. Peter, being a product of traditional Germanic culture, knew how to do the hand kiss correctly, though sometimes he seems to be putting a little more lip in it than is strictly proper.

I like the fact that the creators of the Addams Family musical are taking the same direction as the Barry Sonnenfeld “Addams” movies in making Gomez specifically Hispanic. Given that one of the dancing Addams ancestors on Broadway is a conquistador and that the Addamses live in New York City I’m guessing that Nathan Lane’s Gomez, like Raul Julia’s, is Puerto Rican.

Like John Astin, Raul Julia didn’t fit Gomez’s profile as far as height and weight, but his eyes were perfect. More than Peter’s, actually.

Q: For the better part of a century it’s been pretty much universally agreed that Peter Lorre was ugly, creepy and repulsive. So how come suddenly all these women think he’s hot?

A: It might surprise you to know that from the very beginning Peter has had adoring ladyfans. Women who saw him in “M” sent him mash notes about his beautiful eyes.   In “The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre,” Stephen D. Youngkin describes an incident in the 1940s where he was mobbed by screaming bobbysoxers. So we’ve always felt this way about Peter, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1998 when a female admirer organized the first online discussion list for Peterfans that we discovered how many of us there are. The most frequent expression we heard from each other in those days was, “I thought I was the only one!”

Not all of Peter’s ladyfans are actually in love with him. Some of us just enjoy his work and think he’s cool. However, I’ve noticed that all Peter’s female fans tend to have certain attributes in common, notably above average intelligence, a passion for and extensive knowledge of the arts, and creative ability (many of us are writers, actresses and visual artists for whom Peter has served as a highly stimulating muse.) We also tend to be stylish, urbane and quite attractive.  I think Peter would be pleased with us.

What the ladyfan’s intelligence, creativity and sense of style does for her in regards to Peter Lorre is to give her the ability to look beyond cultural assumptions about him (that he’s ugly and nasty, that he was a “character actor” and therefore less interesting and important than his more heavily hyped colleagues) and size him up according to her own aesthetic standards and values.

Put it this way.  For a number of years the most popular dog in America has been the Labrador retriever. They’re nice dogs and I can see why so many people want them. But I prefer my shih tzu. She’s been sneered at by men to whom this big-eyed, barrel-chested, elegant little creature is just not what a dog is supposed to be. But she’s just right for me. Besides, she’s beautiful.

Q: Was Peter Lorre gay?

A: Biographical sources indicate that he had a strong heterosexual preference. The only reference to anything approaching man on man love I’ve come across is in Stuart Jerome’s “Those Crazy Wonderful Years When We Ran Warner Bros.”:

“Peter Lorre and George Raft, working on adjoining sets, happened to be engaged in conversation outside of Stage 18 when a Tanner [tour] bus lumbered into view. On a sudden impulse, prankster Lorre took Raft in his arms in a tight embrace. As the bus slowly moved past, forty pairs of staring eyes, set in shocked, incredulous, middle-American faces, witnessed the two stars engaged in a passionate mouth-to-mouth kiss.

The bus turned the corner before Raft was able to extricate himself from Lorre’s embrace.

‘My God!’ he cried, gagging. ‘What the hell was that for?’

Lorre shrugged sadly. ‘I just thought we should give those poor creeps a little fun.’”

Note however that Jerome doesn’t claim to have been an eyewitness to this incident. I suspect it’s an urban legend variant on a more widely reported incident in which Raft assaulted Peter on the set of “Background to Danger” because he claimed Peter wouldn’t stop blowing cigarette smoke in his face.

Q: I’ve seen Peter Lorre described as a Hungarian, an Austrian, a German–what was he really?

A: Ethnically speaking he was a Germanic Jew. In terms of nationality, it’s a little complicated due to European politics and the fact that his family moved around a lot when he was growing up. He was born in an ethnically Slovakian area that currently belongs to Slovakia, but which at that time was part of the Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so he may have technically been a citizen of Hungary. However, his first language was German, many of his formative years were spent in suburban Vienna, and Germans and Austrians have told me that his accent sounds very Austrian to them.

Q: Did Peter Lorre ever play a mad scientist’s hunchbacked assistant named Igor?

A: I think the more up to date term is “a mad scientist’s assistant with kyphosis.”

He definitely never played one in any feature film. He did a lot of television and radio work, most of which I haven’t been able to see or hear yet, so he could have played one on TV or radio, though I tend to doubt it as it seems like the sort of horror-typed role he tried to avoid. My theory is that the meme was started by some comedian doing a Peter spoof as the assistant in a mad scientist sketch. Peter did play a sort of mad scientist in “Mad Love.” Factor in that his chronic lung infections gave him a noticeably oversized barrel chest that could be interpreted as a sort of “hunch” in back, and that Dwight Frye, who played the lab assistant with kyphosis in “Frankenstein,” and J. Carrol Naish, who played a similarly affected character in “House of Frankenstein,” were both small actors with large brown eyes, and you can see how people could get mixed up.

As for Ygor, the wily Russian peasant with the wry broken neck who plays such a memorable part in “Son of Frankenstein” and “The Ghost of Frankenstein,” that was Bela Lugosi.

Q: Wasn’t Peter Lorre a drug addict?

A:  Yes, but not in the sense of being a recreational user. According to Peter’s official biographer Stephen D. Youngkin, Peter developed an addiction to morphine in his early twenties while being treated for a lung infection. Unfortunately, the periodic anti-addiction treatments he underwent (including electroshock) were extremely primitive and ineffective,  and for the rest of his life he alternated between periods of recovery and dependence on morphine and other prescription painkillers.

People who’ve spent time around heroin addicts (heroin being a form of morphine) have told me that although Peter was very good at acting straight when he wasn’t, they’re able to tell when he was under the influence of morphine in his films. The most noticeable to them is “Mr. Moto’s Gamble,” in which he actually seems to be close to nodding out once or twice.

I, a poor peasant, have conquered science. Why can’t I conquer love?

—Dr. Gogol, “Mad Love”

I am here, free as the wind, a fountain of extraordinary knowledge, splendidly corrupt and eager to be of profitable service.

—Toady, “Rope of Sand”

Why do I have to waste my time outwitting morons?

—Professor Fenninger, “You’ll Find Out”

DANNY: You mean you croaked a guy?

PROFESSOR STURM: What else was I to do? I am so little and he was such a large man–as big as you!

—”Nancy Steel Is Missing!”

Sic transit gloria mundi, which means…er, what I wanted to say…one never knows the secret of his neighbor’s brain.

—Dr. Lorencz, “The Boogie Man Will Get You”

Peter Lorre impressions are a dime a dozen. Here, the British actor George Costigan has actually created a fully imagined character as Peter might have played him. It’s priceless.

Starts at @5:12.

During World War II, when the actress and writer Ruth Berlau found herself homeless, without money and pregnant with Bertolt Brecht’s baby, she went for help to Peter Lorre, who gave her the keys to one of his houses in California (he had a few of them.) In 2004 I wrote a play about this, drawing on research from John Fuegi’s “Brecht and Company” and Berlau’s memoir “Living for Brecht.” I showed the play to a friend whose reaction was, “These are the most dysfunctional people I ever heard of!” She asked me why, if “Lotsi” and his wife “Celie” still loved each other, he would be with another woman and she would be all right with that. I told her I didn’t know, but that’s what happened.

The play doesn’t tally 100% with the facts. Most importantly, Ruth had left Peter’s house and was staying at a hotel when she had her miscarriage. But I was pleased when Stephen D. Youngkin’s biography of Peter came out to see that nothing in that book seemed to contradict what I had imagined in my play. In fact, his revelation that Celia had actually gone along with Peter and Kaaren Verne on their honeymoon, and that Kaaren apparently didn’t think this was a big deal, seems to confirm the way I imagine things worked in Peter’s “happy harem.”

So here’s my play, I Followed My Man to the Desert.

The Peter Lorre Library of Sound

The Jazz Butcher, “Peter Lorre”

While watching the Patrice Chereau version of Wagner’s Ring cycle I found myself falling in love with Heinz Zednik. At first I thought it was because of how adorably he was playing Loge in “Das Rheingold” as Riff-Raff from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” but then when I found I was just as gone over his Mime in “Siegfried” I realized, of course, it’s because he’s playing all the Peter Lorre roles.

Finding myself subsequently falling for Siegfried Jerusalem’s Loge in the Metropolitan Opera-James Levine “Rheingold” confirmed this, as I am usually not the Heldentenor type.

You could say there are three Peter Lorre roles in the Ring cycle if you disregarded the voice part (and though he was a tenor Peter could never carry a tune anyway) and add in Alberich, the lovelorn industrialist dwarf who can be seen as analogous to Mr. Danel in “Island of Doomed Men.” Mime is the Joel Cairo-Ugarte beta male type of Peter role with Siegfried and Wotan standing in for Humphrey Bogart as the abusive alphas. But Loge is the Peter that all his ladyfans love to see best, the witty, quicksilver eccentric who can charm his way in and out of anything. Like Toady in “Rope of Sand,” he is “free as the wind, a fountain of extraordinary knowledge, splendidly corrupt and eager to be of profitable service.” Maybe some future director at Bayreuth will costume Loge like Dr. Lorencz in “The Boogie Man Will Get You,” in a minister’s frock coat with a kitten in his pocket, or better yet as Mr. Moto, rising pacifically above the bedlam of ordinary gods in his immaculate tropical weight linen suit.

Introducing the Adventures of Peter and Claude

Peter and Claude Get Lucky

Peter and Claude and the Krazy Kreep