If you like your Broadway musicals wild and crazy and loud and flashy and all over the place, you’ll likely not mind that Beetlejuice, now playing at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, doesn’t quite succeed in adapting the Tim Burton masterpiece for the Broadway stage.

Burton buffs will recall the 1988 fantasy horror comedy flick that starred Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as young marrieds Adam and Barbara Maitland, who following their untimely accidental side-by-side demises, find them sharing the attic of the country house they’ve recently purchased with the wacky Netherworld “bio-exorcist” title character immortalized on celluloid by Michael Keaton.

And if death in their early thirties weren’t already enough to cope with, imagine the Maitland ghosts’ dismay when the folks who’ve bought their beloved residence set about decimating its Victorian charms in favor of a godawful postmodern redesign, thereby leaving Michael and Barbara no other option but to enlist Beetlejuice in driving the intruders away.

Clocking in at a brisk hour and a half, Beetlejuice The Movie served primarily as a second look (following his directorial debut three years earlier with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) at the unique visual brilliance of Tim Burton, his sophomore effort jam-packed with stop-motion animation, puppetry, and bluescreen effects, most of which would be impossible to replicate on stage.

The solution that book writers Scott Brown and Anthony King have come up with is to take a lot of liberties (and by that I mean a lot) with Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren’s screenplay and pack their musical adaptation with a whole lot more plot (and characters either created or reconceived for the stage), then let songwriter Eddie Perfect, director Alex Timbers, choreographer Connor Gallagher, an all-star design team, and a multitalented cast do the rest.

Teenaged Lydia Deitz (Isabella Esler taking over for the movie’s Winona Ryder) is now mourning the recent loss of her beloved “Dead Mom,” and her father Charles (Jesse Sharp) is now merely cohabitating with “life coach” girlfriend Delia (Kate Marilley) and not married to her as in the film.

And unlike the movie original, Beetlejuice The Musical makes sure to introduce its title character (played dazzlingly on tour by Justin Collette) right from the get-go, and to make his relationship with the grieving Lydia the show’s main focus.

It’s an approach that both works (in terms of turning the show into a more “traditional” song-and-dance-based musical) and disappoints (because much of what made Burton’s movie special is lost in a screen-to-stage transfer that adds more than half an hour to the show’s running time including a long, confusing Act Two journey to The Netherworld).

Not that anyone in Beetlejuice’s Opening Night audience at the Pantages seemed to be complaining, not even when a sudden, dramatic Act Two father-daughter scene suddenly turned the heretofore over-the-top antics into something seemingly out of an entirely different show.

What Beetlejuice The Musical does provide is a tour-de-force star turn for leading man Collette, who steals every scene he’s in with unrestrained ghoulish glee and audience interaction galore.

A beefed-up role gives Esler abundant opportunities to show off power pipes to reach the back row of the balcony in addition to considerable dark-comedy chops.

The boyishly charming Burton and the girl-next-door engaging Coleman are both quite splendid (and I got a big gay kick out of Beetlejuice’s suggestive banter with Burton’s nerdy-hunky Adam), and a terrific Sharp plays straight man to the fabulous Marilley as the decidedly ditzy Delia.

Adding to the over-the-top shenanigans are Brian Vaughn and Kris Roberts (Maxie and Maxine Dean), the latter doubling hilariously as the chain-smoking Juno, Abe Goldfarb as Otho (whoever he’s supposed to be), and Jackera Davis and Danielle Marie Gonzalez as (respectively) a cookie-selling Girl Scout and Netherworld-inhabiting beauty queen Miss Argentina, both of whom are new to the stage adaptation.

Director Timbers gives his cast free rein to play it as big as they please while choreographer Gallagher provides Michael Biren, Juliane Godfrey, Eric Anthony Johnson, Kenway Hon Wai K. Kua, Katie Lombardo, Sean McManus, Lee N Price, Nevada Riley, Trevor Michael Schmidt, and Corben Williams with ample opportunities to show off plenty of kooky, quirky dance moves as assorted ghouls and goblins, and never more so than when surrounding Collette’s Beetlejuice with a stageful of goofy doppelgangers in the Act Two showstopper “That Beautiful Sound.”

Not surprisingly, half of Beetlejuice’s eight Tony nominations were for the design contributions of David Korins (sets), William Ivey Long (costumes), Kenneth Posner and Peter Nigrini (lighting), and Peter Hylenski (sound), who along with their fellow designers (in particular projection designer Peter Nigrini) give the musical a delightfully offbeat, off-kilter look.

Music director Andy Grobengieser expertly conducts the Beetlejuice orchestra, with musical supervision, orchestration, and incidental music by Kris Kukul.

Catie Davis is associate director and Michael Fatica is associate choreographer. Alan D. Knight is Production stage manager and Joel T. Herbst is company manager.

Casting is by The Telsey Office, Rachel Hoffman, CSA, and Rashad Naylor. Ryan Breslin, Morgan Harrison, Matthew Michael Janisse, and Lexie Dorsett Sharp are swings.

Few movies have likely presented greater challenges to their musical adapters than Beetlejuice, a film so much reliant on its special effects that it would be unfeasible to even try to replicate them on stage.

Though its creative team have done their best to find ways to overcome those challenges, the task they undertook in adapting Tim Burton for Broadway may have been nearly impossible from the get-go, and it shows.

Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles. Through July 30. Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:00. Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00. Sundays at 1:00 and 6:30.
www.broadwayla.org

–Steven Stanley
July 12, 2023
Photos: Matthew Murphy

Tags: Broadway In Hollywood, Eddie Perfect, Los Angeles Theater Review, Pantages Theatre, Scott Brown and Anthony King, Tim Burton