Theatre
Eddie Perfect’s enjoyably excessive adaptation of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice is a gothic fantasia. By Ben Brooker.
Pitch Perfect: Beetlejuice The Musical a rambunctious spectacle
Tim Burton’s antic comedy Beetlejuice joins a growing list of beloved 1980s and ’90s movies adapted as stage musicals, from Dirty Dancing, Footloose and Hairspray, to Back to the Future, Flashdance and Ghost. Last year saw the Australian premiere of Groundhog Day, Tim Minchin’s enjoyable take on 1993’s time-bending Bill Murray vehicle. Now fellow Australian Eddie Perfect has refashioned Burton’s barely 90-minute cult classic into a big two-act musical that, while taking many of its stylistic cues from the source material’s distinctive German expressionism-influenced aesthetic, nevertheless succeeds in finding its own voice.
We can perhaps attribute the glut of ’80s movies-turned-musicals partly to Generation X and Y nostalgia and partly to the risk-aversion of post-Covid commercial theatre. Why go to the trouble of thinking up and devising a marketing strategy for a wholly new show when you can simply retool existing IP and sell it to a mass audience who already know and love the original? Cynical as that sounds, it’s a formula that all but guarantees popular – if not critical – success.
When Beetlejuice premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, in 2018 before transferring to Broadway, critics pilloried its crassness and cartoonish excess and the absence of the movie’s offbeat charm. The Washington Post’s Peter Marks prescribed “a trip back to a lab where they fix musicals”.
Perhaps somebody was listening. The Beetlejuice that arrives at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre five years after the pandemic interrupted its Broadway run, and with Perfect himself having replaced Alex Brightman in the title role, succeeds on almost every level. An affectionate but adventurous reimagining of the original, it is tautly told and exuberantly performed, a delightful gothic fantasia bursting with spectacular stagecraft.
The musical’s plot reproduces that of the film in broad brushstrokes. Adam and Barbara Maitland (Rob Johnson and Elise McCann), a normie, recently married couple, die unexpectedly. When they “wake up” as ghosts, an impish, millennia-old demon and “bio-exorcist” named Beetlejuice offers to help them adjust to the afterlife and scare away their home’s new owners, Charles Deetz (Tom Wren) and partner Delia (Erin Clare).
They agree, but the demon has a desire of his own: to get a human to say his name three times, thus rendering him visible to the living. Only Lydia (Karis Oka), the Deetzes’ “strange and unusual” teenage daughter, can see Beetlejuice, and the two form an uneasy alliance as the Maitlands attempt with growing desperation to reclaim their home. What follows is an increasingly outlandish series of set pieces involving various hauntings, possessions and visits to a bizarre, spectre-filled netherworld.
There are departures from the source material – the musical opens not with the Maitland deaths but the funeral of Emily, Lydia’s mother – which mostly serve to foreground Lydia’s emotional journey. Her quest to find and bring her dead mother back from the netherworld, hastily introduced and just as hastily abandoned though it is, becomes the heart of the show, complemented by Beetlejuice’s own mummy issues.
While these changes perhaps sentimentalise and certainly lighten Burton’s vision – this is, after all, very much a musical in the Broadway tradition – the result retains the movie’s anarchic energy and surreal flair. Wisely, it keeps the songs made famous by Harry Belafonte, especially during the dinner party scene – one of the movie’s best – which is restaged here almost note-for-note, disembodied hands and all. Despite attempts by Perfect and writers Scott Brown and Anthony King to work in themes of living for the moment, grief and the importance of family, Beetlejuice is a show powered by spectacle rather than substance.
The second number, “The Whole ‘Being Dead’ Thing”, encompasses the show’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sensibility, segueing from ska, death metal and swing to nursery rhyme-ish ukulele strumming, and punctuated by metatheatrical asides and off-colour jokes delivered at breakneck speed. When Beetlejuice snorts a line of white powder off his coat sleeve and quips “every show I do a tonne of coke”, you can almost believe Perfect does, such is the sustained intensity of everyone involved.
Despite the inappropriate jokes and the title character’s lecherousness, the musical feels less risqué than the movie. Perhaps this is due to Perfect, our raconteurish “guide to the other side”, who, while never less than committed and unerringly charming, never quite convinces in the same way Michael Keaton does in the movie.
The stand-out performances are, without a doubt, provided by Oka and Clare. While lacking Winona Ryder’s insouciance, Oka brings a winning earnestness to a much more fleshed-out role, and sings terrifically to boot. Her final belt in “Home”, one of the show’s better power ballads, is jaw-dropping. Clare, who plays a Delia evolved from Catherine O’Hara’s self-dramatising artist in the film into a ditzy, New Age humbug-spouting life coach, is scene-stealingly hilarious. Their duet, the calypso-inflected “No Reason”, is a highlight.
First-rate support is provided by McCann and Johnson, leaning into the likeable gormlessness of the Maitlands, and Wren, who is something like a cross between Jordan Peterson and Steve Coogan with his oily, middle-aged overconfidence. There are enjoyable cameos by Andy Conaghan as Delia’s ludicrous guru Otho and Angelique Cassimatis as netherworld receptionist Miss Argentina.
Throughout, the verbal and visual gags rarely let up, nor a succession of larger-than-life puppets – both the shrunken-headed Harry the Hunter and a giant sandworm make memorable appearances – designed with due deference to Burton’s originals by Michael Curry. Impressive magic tricks and assorted stage wizardry courtesy of illusionist Michael Weber and special effects designer Jeremy Chernick come thick and fast, all of it somehow held together by Alex Timbers’ unfailingly dynamic direction.
David Korins’ set, slickly transforming from the Maitlands’ lived-in country house to the Deetzes’ cold, grey dream and finally to Beetlejuice’s chaotic sandbox, manages to preserve the movie’s slantwise aesthetic without hindering the performers. The 11-piece band, under the direction of Anthony Barnhill, is superb, as is the large ensemble, called upon to inhabit everything from a gameshow panel of oversized skeletons to a troupe of dancing Beetlejuices (here, as elsewhere, credit is due to choreographer Connor Gallagher and costume designer William Ivey Long).
The show’s early critics were not wrong in pointing to Beetlejuice’s excesses. Whether you enjoy it or not may well depend on your tolerance for sensory overwhelm – and perhaps for a musical without, it must be said, any songs that will likely be replaying in your head on the way home. But Perfect and his collaborators have created a show that is, in its way, the equal of its source material, a rambunctious spectacle that (dis)embodies the best qualities of contemporary musical theatre. Say it – see it? – three times.
Beetlejuice The Musical is playing at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 21, 2025 as "A dead cert".
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