This ‘Beetlejuice’ is full of tricks
The musical, presented by Broadway in Boston, puts the demon and the goth girl at center stage
In director Tim Burton’s ‘80s cult classic “Beetlejuice,” the manic, mischief-making title demon, played by Michael Keaton, famously doesn’t materialize until 25 minutes into the movie and only accrues about 17 minutes of total screen time. In adapting the film into a Broadway stage musical, director Alex Timbers and his creative team knew Beetlejuice had to shift to the center of the story alongside Lydia, the moody misfit teenager who conjures him up. “The two of them have a real complementary set of goals,” says Timbers in a recent phone interview. “He’s a dead guy who wants to be alive, and she’s a living girl who wishes she was dead.”
The national tour of the show, with music and lyrics by Australian songwriter and actor Eddie Perfect and a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, arrives at the Citizens Bank Opera House for a two-week run, May 2-14, presented by Broadway in Boston.
Timbers explains that the irreverent Beetlejuice, with his green hair, bulging eyes, and garish striped suits, echoes the Leading Player in “Pippin” and the emcee in “Cabaret,” who seduce you but also make you question their motives. “You don’t fully trust those characters. There’s a danger and a darkness to them,” Timbers says. “Beetlejuice is kind of a trickster figure, an unreliable narrator who brings us into this world and carries us through.”
Strange goth girl Lydia Deetz (Isabella Esler), has just lost her mother, and her father (Jesse Sharp) seems disinterested in getting to know his daughter. They move into the house formerly owned by childless couple the Maitlands (Britney Coleman and Will Burton), now deceased after a tragic accident. As in the movie version with Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the roles, the Maitlands’ ghosts are haunting their former home.
Beetlejuice (Justin Collette) offers to help the ghosts of the Maitlands adjust to the afterlife and scare away the Deetzes. They soon discover that moody Lydia can see dead people, and she conspires with the Maitlands to convince her father that the house is haunted. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice remains lonely and invisible to the world. Can he persuade Lydia to summon him from his state of limbo by saying his name three times?
Musical theater, Timbers notes, has a history of juicy con men, from “The Music Man”’s Harold Hill to “The Producers”’s Bialystock and Bloom. “And Lydia and Beetlejuice are both con men in a way,” he says. Their relationship has “a frenemy aspect to it. They don’t entirely trust one another. They’re both always trying to get something from the other person, and there’s a one-up manpered ship between them.”
“It’s a show about grief and death, but it’s really a show about celebrating life and living every moment,” Timbers says. “At the beginning, you’ve got Lydia who’s living in the past and thinking about the loss of her mother. And then you’ve got her father who’s just un-blinkered looking in the future and doesn’t want to talk about or deal with the death of his wife.”
With its supernatural demon and characters that get pulled into the netherworld, Timbers saw “Beetlejuice” as a “haunted house show, and the house should keep transforming,” he says. “You see it as the Maitlands’ house, and then you see it as the Deetzes’ house, and then it’s the Beetlejuices’ house. And it should be filled with tricks. The house is really another character in itself.”
Mansfield native David Korins, a three-time Tony nominee who also designed “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” created the set, and the production design is chock full of lightningquick scenic changes, mind-blowing special effects (including Beetlejuice throwing fireballs), brain-tickling illusions and eye-popping puppetry.
“It’s by far the most complex set I’ve ever worked on,” Korins told the Globe previously. “There is not a single piece of scenery that doesn’t have a light in it, a speaker in it, a hole for a puppet, a special effect, a magic trick, an access panel, a secret door.”
The house has to morph four times — all in the blink of an eye. “And we had to do it with a sense of humor while honoring the Tim Burton aesthetic and the Burtonian landscapes of all of his films,” said Korins. “There are a zillion little Easter eggs from his movies peparound the set.”
Timbers says they wanted the musical to reflect and “respect the [do-ityourself ] aesthetic of the movie. So not going high-tech with everything, and instead using things that are tactile like puppets.” Cue a flurry of phantoms and a giant sandworm.
When “Beetlejuice” opened on Broadway in 2019, it earned eight Tony nominations, but reviews were mixed. Still, it spawned a fan base thanks to the cast album and a strong social media following. “On any given night at least 10 to 20 percent of the audience, if not more, is cos-playing,” Collette says, “dressed up in handmade Lydia gowns and Beetlejuice costumes with the full makeup. It makes for such a fun atmosphere.”
How do you play a demon, especially one as in-your-face as Beetlejuice? “You think the wildest thoughts you had about the world when you were 12 years old and let those rip with the confidence of an adult man,” Collette says, with a chuckle. “It’s a thrill to play him because he’s so unhinged. If I’m upset during the day about anything, I just bottle it up for that night.”
Collette has found himself “swimming in the wake” of two-time Tonynominated actor Alex Brightman, who originated the roles of both Beetlejuice and Dewey Finn in “School of Rock” on Broadway, the latter a part that Collette has also played. The characters share some similarities, Collette says. “They both have a wild vulnerability. They wear their heart on their sleeves, but don’t really have inside voices. Everything they think they’re processing out loud in front of you.”
“He deals a lot with loneliness and feeling unseen,” the actor says of this latest character. “I gotta say, living through a two-year pandemic in a small New York City apartment, cut off from all your friends and family, was perfect preparation for playing this guy.”
Still, the show approaches difficult topics with “levity and lightness,” Collette says. “We don’t deal with death by glossing over it. We go headfirst into the [expletive], and then try to make it lighter once we’re in there. Hopefully you walk out knowing that other people have gone through what you’re going through. So you feel a little less alone.”