One of my favourite Broadway shows, Beetlejuice The Musical, has hit the West End looking like it has been dragged backwards through a haunted fairground, force-fed six espressos and told to behave itself in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It certainly doesn’t do that, though this is a very good production rather than a fully possessed one.
The bones of Tim Burton’s 1988 film are familiar, though anyone expecting a dutiful stage photocopy of the movie should prepare to have their handbook for the recently deceased confiscated at the door. Lydia Deetz, a grieving teenage goth, moves into a house already occupied by the newly dead Adam and Barbara Maitland, while the demonic Beetlejuice waits for someone desperate enough, lonely enough or foolish enough to say his name three times.
But Scott Brown and Anthony King’s book reshapes the film rather than embalming it. The musical pushes Beetlejuice centre stage from the start, turns Lydia’s grief into the emotional engine of the evening, and gives the Maitlands a slightly naff comic innocence.
David Fynn plays Beetlejuice with huge comic attack and a strong instinct for audience rapport. He is funny, nimble and generous with the room. But he is also the reason this London production never quite reaches the giddy, toxic brilliance of the Broadway version. Alex Brightman’s Beetlejuice sounded as if he had been gargling gravel in the Netherworld, with that extraordinary husky rasp giving the character danger as well as derangement. Fynn does not have that out-of-this-world voice, and his Beetlejuice is less feral, less threatening and more obviously eager to be loved.
Fynn’s camper version of the title character works when he is improvising, baiting the crowd or stomping all over the fourth wall like it owes him money. But it also makes the character feel a little too keen to prove how outrageous he is. At times, this Beetlejuice is not just breaking the rules. He is waving the rulebook in the air and shouting, “Look, I’m breaking the rules.” The six-seven playground hand movement may have got a roar from younger audience members, but it already feels slightly stale. In a few years’ time, that gag will have all the freshness of last year’s TikTok dance being performed at a school assembly by a supply teacher.
The London personalisation is one of the evening’s sharpest pleasures. The opening number has been retooled with jokes about the West End and the NHS, which immediately tells the room this is not some sealed Broadway import sitting in customs wrapping. Elsewhere, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s head receives attention no composer’s head should reasonably expect, Basildon is invoked with appropriate spiritual horror, and a running sweary rant about another very popular West End musical becomes funnier by sheer indecent persistence. It is crude, fast and childish, but in the way a perfectly timed whoopee cushion can still be art.
Hannah Nordberg is excellent as Lydia Deetz, giving the show the emotional ballast it needs. She has the right stillness in the early scenes, making Lydia feel like someone watching life from behind thick glass, and then lets the songs crack that glass open. ‘Dead Mom’ feels specific, angry and young, and it works wonderfully.
David Hunter and Chelsea Halfpenny are delightful as Adam and Barbara Maitland, all cardigans and pre- Tim Curry Brad & Janet. Their comedy works because they play it absolutely straight. Aimie Atkinson’s Delia Deetz brings a tightly wound, wellness-adjacent lunacy that suggests every self-help seminar ever held in a hotel conference room has finally achieved human form. Alasdair Harvey gives Charles Deetz enough emotional distance to make Lydia’s loneliness credible without turning him into a cartoon villain.
The score, by Eddie Perfect, is the real surprise. Film-to-stage musicals often arrive with two good songs, three functional ones, and a lot of meh. Beetlejuice is different. There is not a single number here that feels underpowered. ‘The Whole ‘Being Dead’ Thing’ sets out the show’s deranged stall with filthy confidence. ‘Dead Mom’ gives Lydia a proper musical identity. ‘Home’ earns its emotional swell without asking us to forget the surrounding chaos. Even the comic songs are built with real craft, full of hard rhymes, neat reversals and lyrics that move the plot rather than taking a few minutes out from it.
The production looks sensational. David Korins’s set design gives the house a crooked, gothic cartoon logic, recognisably faithful to the spirit of the film without being trapped by it. The dinner-party possession, with ‘Day-O’, is staged with gleeful precision. The Netherworld sequences are a riot of sickly colour, tricks, puppetry and visual excess, and the design has timing and wit.
Still, the show occasionally tries too hard. A few jokes arrive wearing a sandwich board announcing that they are outrageous. A few others are fired so rapidly that they trip over the corpse of the previous gag. Fynn’s Beetlejuice is at his best when he trusts the character’s filth, loneliness and rage to do the work. He is less effective when the performance chases topicality or coolness, because nothing ages faster than a demon trying to keep up with Year 7 fads.
What makes this Beetlejuice work is that it understands the difference between adapting a film and wearing its skin. It keeps the stripes, the sandworms, the black lace and the banana boat, but it finds its own strange and unusual pulse. It is rude, loud, dazzling, sentimental in just the right places, and much cleverer than its own bad behaviour wants you to notice. It is not the definitive Beetlejuice, and Fynn does not erase the memory of Brightman’s more dangerous original. But as a West End night out, it is gloriously alive, even when surrounded by the dead.