Beetlejuice
Opening Night: April 25, 2019
Closing: June 6, 2020
Theater: Winter Garden Theatre
Website: beetlejuicebroadway.com
The ghost-with-the-most makes his Broadway debut in this hilarious new musical comedy based on Tim Burton’s dearly beloved film. Directed by Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!), Beetlejuice tells the story of Lydia Deetz, a strange and unusual teenager whose whole life changes when she meets a recently deceased couple and a demon with a thing for stripes. With an irreverent book, an astonishing set, and a score that will have you tapping your feet long after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, Beetlejuice is a must-see spectacular that will “Dazzle the eyes!” (New York Post). And under its uproarious surface (six feet under, to be exact), it’s a remarkably touching show about family, love, and making the most of every Day-O!
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April 25, 2019
The dead lead lives of noisy desperation in “Beetlejuice,” the absolutely exhausting new musical that opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater. This frantic adaptation of Tim Burton’s much-loved 1988 film is sure to dishearten those who like to think of the afterlife as one unending, undisturbed sleep. Because as directed by a feverishly inventive Alex Timbers, and starring Alex Brightman as the manic ghoul of the title, this production proposes that not being alive just means that you have to try harder — a whole lot harder — than you ever did before. Otherwise, you’ll wind up invisible, with nary a soul to acknowledge your starry self. And in today’s world of chronic self-advertising, this may be the true fate worse than death.
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April 25, 2019
Maybe if they’d said it a fourth time. Three times – “Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!” – summons to life the stripe-coated, fright-wigged demon that made a superstar of Michael Keaton way back when. Could a fourth have magically conjured that extra something needed to transform Broadway’s Beetlejuice into something beyond the realm of good enough? Directed by the busy and talented Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), a long-in-the-making musical comedy Beetlejuice, based, faithfully if not enough, on Tim Burton’s 1988 film opens tonight at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. There’s plenty worth a haunt here, from David Korins’ off-kilter spook house set to Alex Brightman’s raspy-voiced title performance and, most of all, the deliriously gorgeous singing of young Sophia Anne Caruso, and it all comes within reasonable reach of exorcising the bad vibes that attached themselves to the production during its pre-Broadway run in Washington D.C. But diminished expectations can lift a spirit only so far.
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April 25, 2019
Writers Scott Brown and Anthony King, along with composer Eddie Perfect and director Alex Timbers, approach the 1988 Tim Burton cult comedy with the giddy excitement of rabid fanboys in their imaginative musical adaptation of Beetlejuice. That enthusiasm translates to the audience, too, with every visual reference lifted directly from the movie yielding huge laughs. The show is a loving homage to a wonderfully weird original, reconceived for the stage with eye-popping design, full-throttle performances and a mischievous sense of fun that literally seems to drip from the Winter Garden Theatre’s chandeliers, tinged a ghoulish green for the occasion.
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April 25, 2019
“Such a bold departure from the original source material!” wisecracks the odd-looking fellow sitting on a coffin at the start of the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice.” The weird, nasty and outrageous title character is talking about a short lament just sung by a sad teen at her mother’s gravesite, as he breaks the fourth wall (“Holy crap! A ballad already?”) — and the show breaks from the iconic 1988 Tim Burton film comedy on which it is based. The retooling done since its out-of-town tryout in D.C. — along with a host of others plot twists and character tweaks — gives the latest film-to-musical adaptation fresh snap, surprises and (gasp!) even heart. Sure, the narrative becomes a bit of a cluster-muck in the second act — but mostly it’s just screamingly good fun.
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April 25, 2019
Whatever else it may or may not be, Beetlejuice is spectacularly weird. The best creative work in this musical adaptation of Tim Burton’s 1988 film—about a pair of sweet ghosts trying to rid their house of its distasteful new inhabitants—has gone into its physical form: The designers come at it from all kinds of crazy angles. David Korins’s haunted-house set seems to buckle in the middle and stretch at the edges; William Ivey Long’s costumes are a batty vision of colors and patterns at war. There are magic tricks and giant worms and a starkly linear idea of the afterlife that contrasts well with the chaotic world of the living. If only so much of the rest of Beetlejuice were not a busy mess.
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