Everybody's favorite ghost-with-the-most has finally made it to Broadway. Beetlejuice appears on stage in this hilarious new musical that subverts all of Broadway's conventions. Based on Tim Burton's classic, other-worldly film, this hilarious new musical is an absolute killer.
Beetlejuice tells the story of a strange and unusual teenager whose whole life is upended when she meets a recently deceased couple in her father's new house. Then, when a dastardly demon with a thing for stripes wants to use her for his own nefarious purposes, she has to figure out what is truly important. With an irreverent book, an astonishing set, and a score that will have you tapping your toes long after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, Beetlejuice is musical unlike anything you will see in this world (or the next).
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!
The show, at the Winter Garden Theatre, might have a better chance of persuading us to go on some deep satiric dive here if it was using an adult actress. But Caruso is not yet an adult, although a whopping teenage talent and about the only human to really emerge well from this disaster. Except perhaps for Leslie Kritzer, whose comic instincts as Delia are so great that even the less-than-Perfect's lyrics and the Scott Brown book cannot bury them in bad taste.
Most of the cast overplays (Butler, Kritzer) or underplays (McClure, Dannheisser), but the talented Caruso, with a Cyndi Lauper-like voice, strikes the right balance. This is a challenge for all involved, especially in the second half of Scott Brown and Anthony King's jumbled book. Indeed, if the actors took their scripts, threw them into the air, picked up the pages and performed them in their new order, Act 2 would be about the same. Director Alex Timbers' hyperactive staging and David Korins' huge-but-ugly set don't help matters much.
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