Flashing spotlights in the eyes of audience members is not a special effect and make the opening of Beetlejuice quite annoying. So annoying that I couldn’t settle into my seat and begin enjoying the show until several jokes and two numbers in. Just stop it. And it’s as annoying when they flash blinding lights at the audience at several points during the show.
Like the musical Ghost, which did the same thing, it’s probably the thing I’ll remember about the show. And that’s too bad for a funny, tuneful musical that had two runs on Broadway. Beetlejuice had been running for a year when Broadway shut down for COVID. Some plays went on hiatus. Others closed. Beetlejuice closed. When other shows returned post-pandemic, they reopened in the same theater with pretty much the same casts.
Beetlejuice moved to a different theater with new staging, new cast but pretty much the same production team, and it ran another year, classified as a revival. The tour currently playing at Fair Park Music Hall launched a month before the Broadway revived edition closed.
I only include that info because it says something about how good the show is. It wasn’t good enough to ride COVID storm but it’s certainly better than some of the shows that folded. For me, it ranks somewhere in the middle.
Based on the 1988 Tim Burton film, Beetlejuice follows a recently deceased couple who haunt their own country house, a teenage girl who moves into the house with her father and Beetlejuice, a self-centered demon who plans to kill everyone.
Justin Collette excels as Beetlejuice going from gravelly voiced demon to gay boy without a hint of trouble.
With an exceptional voice, Isabella Esler, still in her teens, shines as the depressed daughter Lydia who moves into the house with her father.
The music by Eddie Perfect is upbeat — for a show about death — and tuneful, though none of it is memorable. If you walk out of the theater humming anything, it’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song,” which ends the first act and is the only song included that Perfect didn’t compose.
“Girl Scout” opens the second act with an hysterically honest diatribe on why no girl should go inside a house while selling cookies — pedophiles.
And the following song, “That Beautiful Sound,” has the show’s most creative choreography.
The book by Scott Brown and Anthony King is filled with one-liners that poke at gay Republicans and book bans in libraries.
I rated the show as a middling musical but by the cheers and whoops from others in the theater, the audience had a great time.
— David Taffet
