‘Beetlejuice’ has the time of its afterlife
Welcome to a show about death! That’s the cast’s enthusiastic introduction to “Beetlejuice,” the Tony-nominated musical adaptation of Tim Burton’s funhouse 1988 film of the same name.
In the touring production presented by Broadway in Boston and inhumed at the Citizens Bank Opera House through May 14, the life we’re given gets all the bells and whistles, not to mention props and wisecracks. The title character is our master of ceremonies, consistently busting the fourth wall to needle the audience.
“Holy crap — a ballad already?” growls Beetlejuice, played with an extra helping of ham by Justin Collette, when he first appears. The show opens with an Edward Gorey scene of blackclad mourners shielded by umbrellas in a rainy cemetery. It’s the burial of Emily Deetz, mother to Lydia, the Goth girl at the center of the story.
As in the movie, Beetlejuice, with his lime-green coif, his prison-striped suit, and his rancid breath, is the undead main attraction. But it’s Lydia, played by doe-eyed newcomer Isabella Esler, who provides the show’s real life force.
The other stars are scenic designer David Korins (“Hamilton”) and his team, who transform the story’s haunted Victorian home in New England into a living cartoon. Every angle is distorted.
So too is the story line itself, which expands upon the film version’s wacky premise — afterlife weirdo tries to help a deceased couple rid their house of the new family that has moved in — to surprisingly moving effect. The musical hinges on Lydia, who misses her mother, and her father, Charles (Jesse Sharp), who is trying to move on after the death of his wife.
“That’s your answer for everything — move forward,” a sobbing Lydia tells her father during a surreal descent into the Netherworld. “I don’t want to forget her. I’m scared I’m going to forget her.”
But fans of the movie — and there are legions, judging by Wednesday night’s lusty reactions to Beetlejuice’s every aside and sight gags, like the Shrunken Head Guy — need not fret that the plot has been thickened with “meaning.” It’s still the same schlocky horror show, with the same calypso music by Harry Belafonte, may he rest in peace.
As the Maitlands, the young couple who lose their home after losing their lives together (in this case, not a plunge off a bridge but a joint electrocution), Britney Coleman and Will Burton are aptly earnest. Her physical comedy helps sell the couple’s attempts to learn the business of proper ghostwork; his nerdiness becomes one of the evening’s better running jokes.
Kate Marilley gives Collette a run for his scenery-chewing money as Delia, Charles’s assistant and Lydia’s stepmother-to-be. A life coach (“whatever that means”), she speaks in fake aristocrat.
Delia and Lydia duet on “No Reason,” the most Disney-fied song from Eddie Perfect’s original compositions, which sends up the empty advice that “everything happens for a reason.” Less cringe-worthy is the razzmatazz of “That Beautiful Sound,” an ensemble number in which Beetlejuice exults in the screams induced by a successful scaring: “Panic and stress/Oh, ain’t it the best/The sound of a heart exploding inside a chest.”
Collette, who starred on Broadway in “School of Rock,” is more gravitybound than Michael Keaton’s berserk Beetlejuice, but he’s every bit as sassy. The gay-Broadway jokes are rampant, and his insistence on marrying the underage Lydia — a plot point that has aged about as well as an unembalmed body — is dispatched with a weak recurring quip: “It’s a Green Card thing.”
The show ends in chaos, with an appearance by the giant sandworm and Beetlejuice presiding over a game show called “Life or Death.” This life thing, he decides, “is a goddamn roller coaster. I don’t know how you people do it.”
Simple. We don’t think about it too much.