Some shows, or at least the idea behind them, strike such a chord with audiences that they won’t let them die.

Take The Addams Family, a musical that got – and fully earned – such horrible reviews on Broadway that it should have closed out of embarrassment after its first week. Yet it is still playing in New York a year and a half later and, stranger yet, it has spawned a national touring version, which is at the Kravis Center this week through Sunday.

This comic take on the ghoulish clan created by cartoonist Charles Addams and first popularized in The New Yorker magazine will never be mistaken for a well-written musical. But an almost unprecedented amount of revision – including three new songs and a new story line – has been made to the road show, resulting in an evening that is fitfully amusing instead of something painful to sit through.

Who knows, maybe a couple of drafts from now, it could realize the potential in the Addamses and become something really worth seeing.

As Tuesday’s opening night audience, which eagerly snapped its fingers to the opening bars of the overture, obviously knew from the ’60s television series, the Addams family is gleefully morbid in its off-kilter world view.

There’s Spanish lothario Gomez, his smoldering, deadpan wife Morticia, Goth daughter Wednesday, her mischievous younger brother Pugsley, zombie-stiff butler Lurch and childlike, light bulb-sucking Uncle Fester. As families go, they have enough creepy quirks for three musicals, but what should they be up to in this one?

Book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elise (whose script for Jersey Boys was so laser-sharp) devised a plot straight out of La Cage aux Folles. They gave Wednesday a "normal" – whatever that means – Ohio-bred fiancé and brought his family to meet the Addamses for what chuckles could be mined from their differences.

For the touring edition, they add the wrinkle that Wednesday asks her dad to keep the engagement temporarily secret from Morticia, a betrayal so severe that it threatens her marriage to Gomez. As a dramatic crisis, it does not quite wash, but it puts Gomez and spouse more in the center spotlight.

This pays dividends with Douglas Sills as Gomez, far more of a leading-man type than original cast member Nathan Lane, who worked too hard for laughs and often came up empty. Sills takes a more casual, offhanded approach, and he scores with two of Andrew Lippa’s best musical numbers, the conflicted Happy/Sad and the new 11 o’clock power ballad, Not Today.

Sara Gettelfinger is a fine foil as Morticia . Blake Hammond is the show’s emotional center as Fester . Other standouts are Courtney Wolfson as Wednesday and Crista Moore as her fiancé’s mother .

The Addams Family

C+

Where: Kravis Center Dreyfoos Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach.

When: Through Sunday, Nov. 13

Tickets: $25 and up. Call: (561) 832-7469 or (800) 572-8471 .

The verdict: A sluggish musical adaptation .