Theatre and book reviews — I've done both, hundreds of times —  can be rough for critics: one rarely gets to experience an inspired production of a play on the level of King Lear, a musical like Guys and Dolls or a book with the power and wit of, say, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

So let me be fair to everyone (as we often-hated critics rarely seem to be) involved in the creation, production and performing of The Addams Family, playing now at the beautiful and pleasant Toronto Centre for the Arts: this is a very enjoyable, wonderfully sung and acted musical about a family of grotesque, death-obsessed, cruel-to-the-point-of-absurdity characters, which first saw light of day (or darkness of night, to maintain the image) as a few hundred cartoons in The New Yorker over a few decades, with continued life/death as a TV series, and then as a very popular movie series.

I love The New Yorker, and I've always mildly enjoyed Charles Addams' strange, morbid characters, but I must confess, I never (even once!) watched the long-running TV series, nor even the films; not out of distaste or deliberate avoidance, I just never seemed to catch one of them — even though my sense of humour often runs toward the weird and surreal. But whatever your feelings about The Addams Family cartoons, TV shows or movies are, it cannot be denied: the book for this recent musical — reportedly awkward and harshly criticized in earlier versions leading up to Broadway and after — is hysterically, laugh-out-loud funny. Then again, what would one expect from the two geniuses who wrote the script for Jersey Boys, one of them being Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote three of Woody Allen's funniest and finest movies, Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan?

If you go to musicals primarily for the music and lyrics, this production is going to leave you hungry. While Andrew Lippa is a respected composer and lyricist, there is probably not more than one or two songs which will stay in your head, and you will have little desire to run out and buy the CD. But many of his words are marvelously comic, worthy of standing next to some of the best lines from the Brickman/Elice script.

One could complain that this musical is essentially based on a single gag: that there is this very strange, depressive family named Addams, consisting of Gomez and Morticia Addams, their son and daughter Pugsley and Wednesday, a zany Grandma, a lunatic Uncle Fester, and a growling Frankenstein-servant named Lurch. And that when they relate to "the real world" — as they must, since Wednesday has fallen in love with a "regular" young man from a "typical" Midwestern family — all hell (or comic heaven) keeps breaking loose. It's one endless oil-and-water/Sharks-and-Jets/Romeo-and-Juliet sick comedy, going on for nearly two and a half hours.

But those gags! A dead bird is carried onstage. Where did it come from? A petting zoo. Gomez and Morticia Addams (acted, sung and danced with flare and wit by Douglas Sills and Sara Gettelfinger, respectively), bemoan that "Wednesday is growing up so quickly! She'll be Thursday before you know it."  When Morticia longs for a trip overseas, she can hardly wait to see "the sewers of Paris." Grandma talks lovingly about her grandchild Pugsley by calling him "my little vermin." And when everyone sings happily that "Death is just around the corner," and the last, prettiest song in the show is "Move Toward the Darkness," your values and attitudes toward life have been twisted beyond recognition, but you are laughing too hard to complain.

Is this a great musical? Hardly. Is this a visually satisfying, rib-tickling, lunatic musical which will entertain you to death? You bet. You've got only until Nov. 27 to catch it, in arguably the most comfortable theatre in the city.

The Addams Family, Toronto Centre for the Arts, Nov. 16-27