What a happy coincidence: two musicals have opened in Melbourne within a week of each other that both take you to hell and back. Hadestown deals with an ancient Greek concept of the underworld, allegorical but rich with meaning. Beetlejuice has a netherworld straight out of the imagination of Tim Burton, cartoonish and strictly adolescent. Neither of them would pass muster with a fire and brimstone evangelist – who’d surely require more wailing and gnashing – but they work well enough as places of wonder and enchantment in a modern musical.
In adapting Burton’s keenly idiosyncratic 1988 film to the stage, composer and lyricist Eddie Perfect and book writers Scott Brown and Anthony King know just what to ditch and what to keep precisely the same. So we get the swirling vortices and striped suits, the sandworm and desiccated head, the dead gridiron players and the woman who smokes out of her trachea. We also get the two calypso songs from Harry Belafonte, the Banana Boat Song (Day-O) and Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora). If the path the story takes is simpler, it hits all the right beats and gets us roughly to the same destination.
The Maitlands, Barbara (Elise McCann) and Adam (Rob Johnson), live in a twee but warmly welcoming Victorian house in Connecticut – until they’re electrocuted in a wiring mishap. Into their home move the Deetzes: Charles (Tom Wren) and his daughter Lydia (Karis Oka), who is mourning the recent death of her mother. With Delia (Erin Clare), the life coach Charles has employed to cheer Lydia up, the Deetzes redecorate, disrupt and disarm the house’s (dead) original inhabitants, and when the Maitlands attempt to scare them away, try to monetise their own haunting. Hanging over this problematic arrangement like a literal bad smell is the demon Betelgeuse (Perfect), who tries to manipulate everyone into saying his name three times so he can return to the land of the living.
In this iteration of the story, Betelgeuse is a lord of misrule, an agent of chaos and our principle narrator (unreliable, of course). He brings the bulk of the fun and danger to the stage, as well as a plethora of jokes in highly questionable taste. Perfect bounds around the stage like a demented pinball and while his gravelly baritone is stretched to breaking at times, he’s so joyous and irrepressible it barely matters. His Betelgeuse is far smuttier and debased than Michael Keaton’s version and Perfect wrings every roguish morsel from it.
If Betelgeuse is the musical’s soul, then Lydia is its heart. Oka brings a surplus of intelligence and edge to the part, her longing for a dead mother landing with more authenticity and depth of feeling than it probably deserves. She doesn’t have the most textured or resonant voice, but she makes a wonderfully droll foil to Perfect and nails the nonchalant teenage disdain. McCann and Johnson are also underpowered vocally, although they bring warmth and vibrancy to the Maitlands, who are the blandest characters on stage. Wren and Clare are delicious as the garish, highly kinky but ultimately thoroughly likable lovers. Noni McCallum and Angelique Cassimatis are terrific in small but memorable parts.
While the cast are strong and the band in fine form, Beetlejuice is a musical powered less by the actors or the score, and more by the direction and design. Alex Timbers marshals the madness with absolute control of pacing and tone. The oversized storyboard set (David Korins) is brash and clever, constantly shifting mood and perspective as the house churns through its owners. Some reveals are astonishing but they’re handled with such casual ease, you take them for granted. William Ivey Long’s costumes are startling and funny, and Michael Curry’s puppets are wickedly expressive. Jeremy Chernick’s special effects dazzle and the whole thing is lit with maximalist precision by Kenneth Posner, so that the stage picture shimmers and pulsates.
Although, for a work where everything is dialled up to eleven and the visual effect is often overwhelming, Beetlejuice’s netherworld feels slightly underdone. With its animated perpetual corridors and diminishing squares, it seems less like a nightmare realm and more like a waiting station for the recently departed. Burton’s vision of hell was endearingly eccentric, but here it lacks texture and detail.
Perfect should be immensely proud of his achievement with Beetlejuice, which is frequently hilarious and consistently entertaining. His songs are lyrically consummate – he shares a love of wordplay and complex internal rhymes with fellow composer Tim Minchin – and he has a great talent for pastiche and parody. The score includes nods to Danny Elfman’s soundtrack, as well as the aforementioned calypso music, without losing its jaunty sense of self. If Beetlejuice’s vision of an afterlife lacks any moral or intellectual dimension, if it’s really just a wacky place with puppets, childlike and emotionally remote – well, same for the source material.
The stage adaptation is careening, nutty and wild, and Perfect cranks the engine of its wit so assuredly he should probably get a raise. He does, after all, “do this bullshit like eight times a week.”
And it is a hell of a lot of fun.
Beetlejuice the Musical is on at Regent Theatre, Melbourne until 3 August
