Photo by Jeremy Daniel

The Addams Family is enjoying a healthy afterlife — no surprise there, really — in the perkily quirky national tour now at Hobby Center.

The musical inspired by Charles Addams’ iconic characters couldn’t get a break from critics on Broadway but deserves one in the heavily revised version developed for the road.

Director Jerry Zaks has overseen the makeover, building on the original work of director/designers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, with Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice sharpening their script and songwriter Andrew Lippa punching up his score.

With greater emphasis on oddball lovebirds Gomez and Morticia, played by the ideally cast Douglas Sills and Sara Gettelfinger, this tighter Addams Family delivers enough solid entertainment to recommend it — and even suggests the clan’s special world enough of the time to satisfying fans of the characters’ previous incarnations.

Reservations remain. The Addamses still are not in their natural habitat in a musical comedy, at least not this one. Having to carry any plot for two acts probably is too much lifting for characters whose ideal universe was the single-panel cartoon, the flash of inspiration with no need to explain its before or after.

The authors compounded the challenge by choosing the conventional plot of Addams daughter Wednesday wanting to marry a boy from a “normal” family. It keeps forcing the macabre characters to keep demonstrating that, in their own way, they are a loving family like any other. Then they remember they are the Addamses and show us that side, too. That accounts for the show’s uneasy footing at times.

Lippa’s lively, eclectic and sometimes catchy score has its pluses, but like the script, is hit and miss in finding the ideal voice for these unique characters. It’s close in such highlights as Morticia’s jaunty/morbid Death Is Just Around the Corner. But its peak is Uncle Fester’s blissful The Moon and Me, which strikes the right balance of weirdness and charm to demonstrate what an ideal Addams Family musical would have been like throughout.

Yet as we become acclimatized to the in-between Addams realm the musical inhabits, it becomes progressively more enjoyable. Shrewdly paced and deftly performed, it further benefits from McDermott and Crouch’s excellent production design, which proves consistently apt and atmospheric in a way that the writing is not.

With his strong singing, smooth moves and persuasive presence, Sills elevates the proceedings as Gomez, filling the role with dash, panache and slightly off-kilter Latin accent.

Gettelfinger conveys the paradox of Morticia, sultry yet blasé. Her throaty singing and deadpan sarcasm fit the role, and her dancing is capable, despite a few tentative moments.

Blake Hammond’s vaudeville-ham Uncle Fester is a joy, irrepressible and exuberantly strange. Cortney Wolfson makes a convincing gothic ingenue as Wednesday, with Brian Justin Crum believably bewildered as her suitor. Seasoned Broadway pros Martin Vidnovic and Crista Moore make the most of the comic opportunities in his fish-out-of-water parents.

Patrick D. Kennedy’s big-voiced Pugsley, Pippa Pearthree’s outspoken Grandma and Tom Corbeil’s lean and lumbering Lurch fill out the Addams circle in proper ghoulish style.

Sergio Trujillo’s spirited albeit conventional choreography lends the occasional boost and there’s considerable fun in the surprises wrought by Basil Twist’s puppetry.

So, though short of perfection, The Addams Family has more going for it than most new musicals these days.

The Addams Family
National tour, Broadway at the Hobby Center series
7:30 Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday
Sarofim Hall, Hobby Center
800 Bagby
$30-$82
800-982-2787