Beetlejuice the Musical Cast Recording Review
God, I hope you’re ready for a show about death.
Beetlejuice is a musical based on the 1988 Film Beetlejuice starring the hit character Beetlejuice.
The movie’s not bad. It has Adam Baldwin, Geena Davis, Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder, who virtually always rules. A husband and wife, Adam and Barbara, die and have to face the new family who moves into their home as well as “Bio Exorcist” (he banishes the living from the homes of the dead) Beetlejuice. They befriend Lydia Deetz, the new owners’ goth-y teen daughter. Life (and death) lessons ensue. It’s also got an incredibly Tim Burton aesthetic because, guess what, this was a Tim Burton movie.
I found the musical to be a solid step up from the film, with all due respect to the film’s talent. The musical follows mostly the same plot beats, but takes extra time to develop Lydia as an outcast teen heartbroken by the death of her mother, so much so that they make Lydia’s feelings of being invisible a key motif for the whole play. On the Original Broadway cast recording, Lydia is played by Sophia Anne Caruso who’s fantastic in the role, not quite out Winona-ing Winona Ryder, but translating her character to musical theater with a ton of panache.
The other highly successful character expansion is of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice himself. Despite being the title character and center of advertising for the film, Beetlejuice didn’t have a ton of screen time, and didn’t really drive the plot in any meaningful way until the very end. He’s a gross ghost with a few decent jokes, but it’s kind of wild that Hollywood thought they had lightning in a bottle with the character.
Cut to the Broadway version of Beetlejuice, a fourth-wall breaking specter who’s constantly interrupting other scenes to steal the show. He’s still gross, from his weirdly aggressive flirting to the his grating voice. Alex Brightman, the original Broadway Beetlejuice, reinvented the character brilliantly, making him charismatic and hard to look at and perfectly tragicomic in a way that fits the tone of the story. It’s easy to roll your eyes at Broadway adapting another famous movie for a musical instead of trying something new, but it’s quite a bit harder when the Brightmans and Caruso’s of the world are so good at it.
I’m moving fast here, but several of the other characters are endearingly dorky, and the songs are as memorable and catchy as you’d hope, even if they’re not as inventive as a Hadestown or Hamilton. This isn’t a groundbreaking show, it’s just a really good adaptation of a film that probably didn’t deserve it. Not that I’m complaining: the end result is a fun time and it’s going to be all over my Spotify Wrapped this year. It’s just not likely to take the world by storm or become your all time favorite.
Still, I consider myself a fan and am going to jump at the chance to see it when it comes anywhere near where I live. 3.9 untimely demises out of 5.