You’ve just been part of a rapturous audience, bedazzled by and besotted with Beetlejuice The Musical after its Australian premiere at Melbourne’s sumptuous Regent Theatre. In front of the proscenium you’ve witnessed an intoxicating, chaotic, jam-packed, zany and harmlessly bawdy package of entertainment that’s simply to die for.
But imagine being backstage, post-show and alone in the darkness, with a black coffin ready for burial, a giant sandworm, freakish skeletons, bloody body parts, a singing roasted pig and the harsh angular expressionistic lines defining spaces that contort perspectival reality. What oozes with first-rate comic gold on one side might be spine-chillingly creepy on the other. How our minds are tricked!
Multi-talented theatrician and beloved Melburnian Eddie Perfect has an unequivocal winner on his hands as composer and lyricist of Beetlejuice. That he fronts up in the title role and owns it with thoroughly demented pizzazz is just as winning. Perfect is unmissable.
And so is the show, now spreading across the globe with its irresistible and irreverent charms since its 2018 premiere in Washington and subsequent, roughly 700 performance run on Broadway, originally directed by Alex Timbers.
With its atypical storyline and intelligible book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, Timbers’ production is a praiseworthy musical adaptation of the 1988 film directed by Tim Burton that beats to its own drum.
Remember how it goes? Lydia Deetz (Karis Oka), a goth teenager is mourning her mother’s death. Lydia discovers her new home is haunted by its previous owners, the recently deceased couple, Adam (Rob Johnson) and Barbara Maitland (Elise McCann).
She encounters the wacky ghost and orchestrator of mayhem, Beetlejuice, who she summons in the hope of scaring off her living family. Beetlejuice has his own agenda. With wild chaos unleashed and madness that ensues, Lydia learns to face her grief, embrace life and find connection.
But it’s not solely Lydia’s troubled journey that the story traces. Beetlejuice, the Maitlands, Lydia’s widowed father Charles (Tom Wren) and his new girlfriend Delia (Erin Clare) are all surveyed as they face a rocky road into the future.
Amongst the hilarity, the universal desire to belong feels ever-present. The story’s distinctions between and clashes with the real world and the Netherworld can, in the process, reflect our own minds’ chaotic state and process in finding harmony.
Fortunately, along the way, character three-dimensionality is elevated, in no small part due to Perfect’s eclectic mood-making music, tangy lyrics and outré dialogue. And Timbers’ direction is transposed here in a two-act, fast-paced feast.
It begins solemnly at the funeral of Lydia’s mother with Oka’s sweet vocals capturing Lydia’s opening introspective song, Prologue: Invisible, with the sadness she feels both of loss and unbelonging.
In a change of scene to the Maitland home, Beetlejuice emerges like a whip of lightning. From the moment Perfect sings out The Whole ‘Being Dead’ Thing in gravelly voiced splendour, a sympathetic heart goes out to this kooky, cartoonish ratbag of sorts.
Oka’s vocal sweetness might lack variable shading but sincerity is warmly worn in her portrayal of Lydia, with Act 2’s Home her shining moment that could bring tears to the eyes of anyone who knows the loss of a mother.
Cutely performed, Johnson and McCann’s Adam and Barbara Maitland are affable and nerdish – safe neighbours you wouldn’t mind having – who take Beetlejuice’s ongoing pokes at them with endearing uncertainty.
Wren and Clare are excellently matched and contrasted as Charles and Delia whose sex-crazed proclivities never wane. There’s nothing understated about Clare’s performance particularly, going close to stealing the show every so often.
Smaller roles are handled with big impact, notably Angelique Cassimatis’ sassy Miss Argentina and Noni McCallum’s demonic Juno with Zimmer frame in tow.
Connor Gallagher’s choreography feels fresh and frenetic, starting with the exuberance of a squad of cheerleaders on hand to introduce Beetlejuice as the ultimate Netherworld authority. The best is to come with a bunch of Beetlejuice clones dancing up a tornado in That Beautiful Sound at the start of Act 2 and a consort of dancing skeletons with oversized skulls soon to follow.
It all gets squeezed into the likes of an electrified pop-up storybook design concept – featuring the living area and attic of a Victorian-era house in its various changes of décor – that bursts out to bring on copious sensory surprises facilitated by a revved up design team.
Musical director Anthony Barnhill and his band of 13 make great impact start to finish. Perfect’s mercurial score does admirable justice to the story but you’re more likely to leave with Harry Belafonte’s Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora) bouncing about your head.
Not unlike a spectacular variety show on some sort of narcotic cocktail, yet still allowing a sense of meaning to shine through, with Beetlejuice, Perfect has certainly earned his stripes. And he wears those signature wide black and white ones expertly.
Beetlejuice The Musical
Regent Theatre, 191 Collins Street, Melbourne
Performance: Saturday 17 May 2025
Season continues to 31 August 2025
Bookings: www.ticketek.com.au
For more information, visit: www.beetlejuicethemusical.com.au for details.
Images: Eddie Perfect as Beetlejuice (centre) and the Cast of Beetlejuice The Musical – photo by Michelle Grace Hunder | Karis Oka as Lydia Deetz, Rob Johnson as Adam Maitland and Elise McCann as Barbara Maitland in Beetlejuice The Musical – photo by Michelle Grace Hunder | The Cast of Beetlejuice The Musical – photo by Michelle Grace Hunder | Karis Oka as Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice The Musical – photo by Michelle Grace Hunder | Eddie Perfect as Beetlejuice and Noni McCallum as Juno in Beetlejuice The Musical – photo by Michelle Grace Hunder
Review: Paul Selar: