Like its ghoulishly fun title character, “Beetlejuice” keeps coming back from the dead.
After opening on Broadway in 2019, the Tony Award-nominated musical — based on the 1988 Tim Burton movie — was felled by COVID-19. When live theatre started again, it popped up at a different Broadway venue for nine months. And then a few days ago came the news that the show’s successful, years-long national tour — which just touched down at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre — would return to Broadway for 13 weeks this fall.
And no wonder.
Despite receiving mixed reviews, the show found audiences on social media platforms like TikTok and (probably related) through word-of-mouth from enthusiastic Gen Z audiences. Fun fact: When I saw the original show back in 2020, I was surrounded by a sea of young fans, many dressed in Beetlejuice’s signature black and white.
You can attribute the zillennial appeal to Eddie Perfect’s irreverent music and lyrics, and to Scott Brown and Anthony King’s book, which makes Goth teen Lydia (Emilia Tagliani, filling in for Madison Mosley on opening night) a much bigger and more developed character than she is in the film (where she’s played by Winona Ryder).
After her mother dies, Lydia, her widowed father Charles (Jesse Sharp) and his current girlfriend/employee, Delia (Sarah Litzsinger), move into a new home whose previous owners — Barbara (Megan McGinnis) and Adam (Will Burton) — have just died. Prodded by the titular ghost (Canadian star Justin Collette), the couple try to scare off the newbies. That doesn’t work, since the fearless Lydia can see them. But their connection to the underworld makes Lydia think she can resurrect her late mom.
The plot is as zig-zaggy as a labyrinthine graveyard. Motivations keep shifting, while storylines and characters abruptly drop out. There are moments in the overlong second act when you’ll look at the time and swear you’ve been stuck in musical theatre purgatory.
But the highs make up for it — perhaps foreshadowed in the clever opening number, when Beetlejuice references snorting cocaine, and snaps at the audience: “Don’t be freaked, stay in your seats, I do this bulls—t, like, eight times a week.”
As does the Burton film, this stage adaptation looks great — even in a touring production meant to fit theatres of different sizes.
David Korins’s deconstructed fun house of a set is all skewed angles and forced perspectives, while Kenneth Posner’s lighting and Peter Nigrine’s projections help set the mood when things shift from the ordinary to the supernatural.
William Ivey Long’s costumes, meanwhile, tell us pretty much everything we need to know about a character, whether it’s an insufferable self-help guru sporting a manbun or, in the very amusing second-act opener, a guileless Girl Guide with heart problems about to sell cookies to whoever’s in the creepy house.
Some sound issues aside, the actors are (excuse the spoiler-alert pun) disarmingly good. Tagliani channels her inner ‘80s punk in the popular song “Dead Mom,” while Burton and McGinnis bring a goofy, wholesome charm to their recently deceased couple, who gain confidence by ganging up on their titular nemesis.
Litzsinger, playing another character who gets a more developed back story, devours her role as a flaky woman with a checkered past. Veronica Fiaoni steals the second act as a former beauty pageant winner who’s now stuck in the Netherworld. And Maria Sylvia Norris has great fun as a trophy wife and chain-smoking demon.
It’s the New Brunswick-born Collette, however, who’s got the biggest challenge in the show — both vocally and dramatically.
In the opening number alone, he’s got to act as our raunchy narrator — in a voice required to sound like sandpaper — and tackle styles as eclectic as heavy metal screech and lounge lizard croon. Later on, his neurotic, quicksilver Beetlejuice has to flirt with anything that moves, and keep the energy high between set pieces.
The fact that he pulls it off, all while wearing what look like centuries-old pyjamas from a Salem sleepover, is impressive.
“Beetlejuice” might not be the most sophisticated or streamlined musical. But as you leave the theatre, you’ll be thinking, “I got my money’s worth.”
And in this economy, that goes a long way.
