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Reviewed by Daniel Barnett
Beetlejuice has finally crossed the Atlantic, parked its hearse outside the Prince Edward and shows no intention of leaving quietly. It is filthy, gleeful and unexpectedly tender, let down only by a leading demon who charms a good deal more than he frightens.
This is a horror-comedy musical built from the bones of Tim Burton’s 1988 film, and the clever thing about Alex Timbers’ production is that it raids the movie for parts without ever settling for a tribute act. The story still belongs to Lydia Deetz, a goth teenager freshly hollowed out by her mother’s death, arriving at a new house with her hopeless father Charles in tow. The house already has tenants: Adam and Barbara Maitland, a sweet married couple who have recently and inconveniently died, and who would quite like the living to clear off. Their attempts at haunting are pretty dismal, so they outsource the eviction to the afterlife’s most disreputable contractor.
Enter Beetlejuice, who treats the fourth wall as a thing to be cheerfully demolished within the opening minutes. He narrates, heckles the audience, and he keeps reminding you that the whole being-dead thing is far more fun than the alternative. Scott Brown and Anthony King’s book is great fun. The first number rewrites itself around the West End and the NHS, there is a joke about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s head that had the audience roaring with laughter, Basildon takes a beating, and a running feud with a certain marmalade-loving family musical down the road escalates into a sweary aria of spite.
As the ghost with the most, David Fynn is enormously good company. He finds genuine pathos too, a loneliness under the leering that the film never bothered with. What he does not quite find is danger. Anyone who saw Alex Brightman wield this role on Broadway will remember a husky, half-rabid menace that made the comedy feel genuinely unsafe; Fynn is broader, camper, and more pantomime imp than predator. That eagerness to please tips, now and then, into trying too hard: at one point he breaks out the six-seven hand-waggle that every Year Six student in the country wore out last year. It is a hugely entertaining performance, but one that reaches for cool where it should reach for menace, and the show loses a little jeopardy for it.
Hannah Nordberg’s Lydia matches him and, on the night, arguably betters him. She plays the early scenes in a flat deadpan, all folded arms and withering vowels, then cracks the whole thing open in ‘Dead Mom’, a number she delivers with a rawness that silences the giggling. By the time she reaches ‘Home’ she has quietly become the evening’s heart. There is lovely work around her, too. David Hunter and Chelsea Halfpenny give the Maitlands a daft, devoted warmth, never funnier than when they strain to be terrifying in ‘Barbara 2.0’, and Aimie Atkinson walks off with several scenes as Delia, the life coach whose serenity is held together with sticky tape and screaming.
What surprised me most is how little of Eddie Perfect’s score you would willingly lose. The songs carry the story that so many adaptations dump on the dialogue, and not one of them stalls for time. ‘Say My Name’ is a tight, witty negotiation set to music; ‘Creepy Old Guy’ turns a deeply uncomfortable second-act wedding into the sharpest comic number of the night; and the first-act dinner party, where polite guests are hijacked into a calypso they plainly did not consent to, is one of the funniest set pieces in town. The comic songs are properly funny, and the lyrics are sharp and memorable.
The spectacle earns its keep at the huge Prince Edward Theatre. David Korins’ sets twist a tidy New England home into something rotten and alive, opening onto a striped, vertiginous Netherworld and, at one glorious second-act moment, a sandworm that the theatre’s old residents – helicopter and flying nanny included – would have admired. It honours Burton’s palette without photocopying it, which is the whole game: this Beetlejuice has a soul of its own, not the film’s hand-me-downs.
So say his name three times and go. The voice and the menace fall a little short of the Broadway benchmark, but everything around the title role is sharp, generous and properly alive. For a show this besotted with death, it is about the most fun you can have without a pulse.
Daniel Barnett practises from Outer Temple Chambers and presents the legal hour on LBC Radio.
Beetlejuice has finally crossed the Atlantic, parked its hearse outside the Prince Edward and shows no intention of leaving quietly. It is filthy, gleeful and unexpectedly tender, let down only by a leading demon who charms a good deal more than he frightens.
This is a horror-comedy musical built from the bones of Tim Burton’s 1988 film, and the clever thing about Alex Timbers’ production is that it raids the movie for parts without ever settling for a tribute act. The story still belongs to Lydia Deetz, a goth teenager freshly hollowed out by her mother’s death, arriving at a new house with her hopeless father Charles in tow. The house already has tenants: Adam and Barbara Maitland, a sweet married couple who have recently and inconveniently died, and who would quite like the living to clear off. Their attempts at haunting are pretty dismal, so they outsource the eviction to the afterlife’s most disreputable contractor.
Enter Beetlejuice, who treats the fourth wall as a thing to be cheerfully demolished within the opening minutes. He narrates, heckles the audience, and he keeps reminding you that the whole being-dead thing is far more fun than the alternative. Scott Brown and Anthony King’s book is great fun. The first number rewrites itself around the West End and the NHS, there is a joke about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s head that had the audience roaring with laughter, Basildon takes a beating, and a running feud with a certain marmalade-loving family musical down the road escalates into a sweary aria of spite.
As the ghost with the most, David Fynn is enormously good company. He finds genuine pathos too, a loneliness under the leering that the film never bothered with. What he does not quite find is danger. Anyone who saw Alex Brightman wield this role on Broadway will remember a husky, half-rabid menace that made the comedy feel genuinely unsafe; Fynn is broader, camper, and more pantomime imp than predator. That eagerness to please tips, now and then, into trying too hard: at one point he breaks out the six-seven hand-waggle that every Year Six student in the country wore out last year. It is a hugely entertaining performance, but one that reaches for cool where it should reach for menace, and the show loses a little jeopardy for it.
Hannah Nordberg’s Lydia matches him and, on the night, arguably betters him. She plays the early scenes in a flat deadpan, all folded arms and withering vowels, then cracks the whole thing open in ‘Dead Mom’, a number she delivers with a rawness that silences the giggling. By the time she reaches ‘Home’ she has quietly become the evening’s heart. There is lovely work around her, too. David Hunter and Chelsea Halfpenny give the Maitlands a daft, devoted warmth, never funnier than when they strain to be terrifying in ‘Barbara 2.0’, and Aimie Atkinson walks off with several scenes as Delia, the life coach whose serenity is held together with sticky tape and screaming.
What surprised me most is how little of Eddie Perfect’s score you would willingly lose. The songs carry the story that so many adaptations dump on the dialogue, and not one of them stalls for time. ‘Say My Name’ is a tight, witty negotiation set to music; ‘Creepy Old Guy’ turns a deeply uncomfortable second-act wedding into the sharpest comic number of the night; and the first-act dinner party, where polite guests are hijacked into a calypso they plainly did not consent to, is one of the funniest set pieces in town. The comic songs are properly funny, and the lyrics are sharp and memorable.
The spectacle earns its keep at the huge Prince Edward Theatre. David Korins’ sets twist a tidy New England home into something rotten and alive, opening onto a striped, vertiginous Netherworld and, at one glorious second-act moment, a sandworm that the theatre’s old residents – helicopter and flying nanny included – would have admired. It honours Burton’s palette without photocopying it, which is the whole game: this Beetlejuice has a soul of its own, not the film’s hand-me-downs.
So say his name three times and go. The voice and the menace fall a little short of the Broadway benchmark, but everything around the title role is sharp, generous and properly alive. For a show this besotted with death, it is about the most fun you can have without a pulse.
Reviewed by Daniel Barnett
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