A ‘HORROR’ OF A SHOW
‘Beetlejuice’ leaves a bad taste
The Beetlejuice is rancid. And be sure not to bring the kids for a drink.
“Beetlejuice” — officially “Beetlejuice the Musical, the Musical, the Musical” — is one of those whatwere-they-thinking shows that crop up on Broadway and spend tens of millions of dollars mostly to reveal an eye-popping tonal disconnect.
In this case, the piece de resistance is the song “Creepy Old Guy,” wherein the show’s adolescent heroine, Lydia (played by Sophia Anne Caruso) sings of her love for the sleazy title character played by Alex Brightman: “Way back when, I was just ten,” go Eddie Perfect’s lyrics. “Simple and sweet, everywhere fellas would stare, and I felt used, kinda confused / I would refuse to look in their eyes, but now I love creepy old guys.”
This, in a family musical in 2019 — and, yes, families will come whatever the creators think. Good luck.
The show, at the Winter Garden Theatre, might have a better chance of persuading us to go on some deep satiric dive here if it was using an adult actress. But Caruso is not yet an adult, although a whopping teenage talent and about the only human to really emerge well from this disaster. Except perhaps for Leslie Kritzer, whose comic instincts as Delia are so great that even the lessthan-Perfect’s lyrics and the Scott Brown book cannot bury them in bad taste.
This is a number that should have cut out of town, along with a whole bunch of other profane and tawdry references to bodily this, that and the other. Sure, the source movie has the same basic series of events, but Tim Burton understood satiric lightness and the 1988 film’s goofy aesthetics counter-balanced the edginess of the horror-comedy plot.
The problems with this show — which does, at least, feature a cool set design from David Korins, witty costumes from William Ivey Long and a genuinely funny shrunken head — are fundamentally structural. In the film, which so many of us love and revere, Beetlejuice is the antagonist — the main plot revolves around a couple, Barbara (Kerry Butler) and Adam Maitland (Rob McClure), who find themselves killed in a car crash and rendered as ghosts.
When another family moves into their beloved house — Delia and Charles Dietz (Adam Dannheisser) — the couple try to scare them away, colluding with the Dietz’s daughter (actually Delia’s stepdaughter) Lydia, the only human who can see the Maitlands.
Meanwhile, the titular hobgoblin has an agenda of his own: he wants to be able to cause trouble in the mortal world and needs an access card.
But in the musical, Brightman’s character immediately gets narrator, I’m-your-guide status, throwing off the entire structure of the plot. He even throws shade at the show itself — lamenting the early arrival of a ballad that is, let me tell you, a lot more pleasant than listening to his repartee. Worse, the show empowers nobody to stand up to him. The Maitlands are inert, dominated by the name on the marquee and unable to drive anything forward.
The second family is mostly ridiculous. Even Lydia gives in (see above). And the director, Alex Timbers, has styled the show so that the whole cast of characters is manic and crazy. They’re all manifestations of a world gone mad — Beetle juices light, all the way through the ensemble and Connor Gallagher’s choreography. And that means the musical lacks a crucial component for the success of any musical: there is no normative character and thus no baseline of truth.
The show demands that we love Beetlejuice, or at least enjoy his company, and yet it doesn’t want to make him anything but a sleazy and abusive interloper. So we don’t love him. And there’s noone to care about instead. You’re just stuck with random gags (few of which land) and people throw-ing money at problems. And with a headache.
Some plot strands are just raised and dropped. At one point, Lydia disappears into the Netherworld looking for her dead mom. A nice quest for a musical, sure, but (spoiler alert) she does not find her. And I honestly could not tell you exactly what the problem turned out to be. She just seemed to decide she didn’t care anymore. Whatever. Who needs a live mom when you have … him!
Truly, this is most cacophonous and ill-conceived musical of the season — in fact, for several seasons. The evidence here suggests the difficulty of adapting Burton’s singular movies, the work of a master of satiric complexity and very much of their era. His hand-squeezed juice needed to stay in the fridge.