A cemetery is also the setting of the first scene of the new “Addams Family” musical, now finishing a tryout here before its scheduled arrival on Broadway in March. In that opening number, “Clandango,” the family dances and sings about loyalty to the Addams way of life; a chorus rollicks around the stage carrying gravestones; and Morticia and Wednesday team up for a mother-daughter tap dance atop a coffin.

What works brilliantly in morbidly hilarious cartoons, however, is a tougher trick to translate to live theater, as the producers of “The Addams Family” have learned. While the musical has drawn huge audiences here, it has received mixed reviews from critics and raised enough concerns for the producers that last week they took the unusual step of hiring the Tony Award-winning director Jerry Zaks to take over and work with the creative team to make 11th-hour fixes to the production, which stars Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia.

Unlike most musical adaptations for Broadway, which come from movies or books, the producers of “The Addams Family” musical chose to base their show on Addams’s cartoons, mainly published in The New Yorker magazine in the 1940s and ’50s. Preferring to eschew the slapstick humor of the popular “Addams Family” television show of the 1960s and three movies in the ’90s, the producers have said their goal was to create a musical that reflected the mordant wit of the cartoons, like the famous one of Gomez, Morticia and Lurch preparing to pour a cauldron of boiling oil on a group of Christmas carolers.

The Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, which holds the copyrights to all of Addams’s works, granted the rights for a Broadway musical to one of the show’s lead producers, Stuart Oken, because he shared the foundation’s desire “to ignore all previous interpretations of the characters known as the Addams family and to create a new story based solely upon the cartoons by Charles Addams,” H. Kevin Miserocchi, the executive director of the foundation and one of its two trustees, said in an e-mail message.

The challenge is undoubtedly steep, given Addams’s ingenuity. His influence is reflected not only in the work of generations of cartoonists but also in movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and those by Wes Craven, and television shows like “The Simpsons.” In those works, rather than coddle children, parents suggest that they turn on each other, as Morticia does in one cartoon when she tells Wednesday to stop “whining” about her maniacal brother and threaten to poison him back.

“By making us laugh at, and with, his fiendish protagonists, he makes us temporarily share those values and doubt our own,” said Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. Referring to the musical, Mr. Mankoff said, “I think to truly reflect Addams’s vision, it would have to make us see the characters onstage not as the strange, weird Other, but through humor to see ourselves.”

Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who is also a playwright, said that sustaining the unique tone and eccentric touches of a “deliciously bad family from hell” like the Addamses was an exciting challenge for a Broadway show, but also a tall order, given that many Americans have strong opinions about how Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester and the rest should look, speak and behave (badly, very badly and beyond).

“The difficulty is that people will bring their own sense of the cartoons, plus the TV shows, plus the movies, to the musical, and those sensibilities will differ,” Mr. Feiffer said. “What the producers should not do is water down the family to some lowest common denominator of behavior in hopes that the biggest audience possible will relate to the musical. In doing so, you would lose what’s special about Addams.”

If the Addams cartoon characters were decidedly off-center — living in a cobweb-strewn house, taking delight in a downpour, reveling in unhappiness — they also displayed a tender love for one another and were never actually shown harming anyone, only wickedly suggesting it, said Linda H. Davis, the author of the 2006 biography “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life.” Indeed, Addams — who based Uncle Fester partly on himself — used the cartoons to, in the words of Mr. Mankoff, “turn our assumptions about normality and its relation to good and evil upside down.”

The new musical does this at times, when Wednesday lovingly tortures Pugsley on a rack, and when Gomez and Morticia fondly recall their first date, when they saw “Death of a Salesman.” At other points the humor involves gags, and some of the character arcs — like Morticia’s laments about growing old — are at odds with the cartoons, which portray Morticia as poised and self-confident, for instance.