Review: Broadway’s ‘Beetlejuice’ at Broward Center is bawdy musical anarchy
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It really, truly, probably shouldn’t work. But somehow, someway, it does.
The Broadway musical “Beetlejuice” can’t clone the movie magic of Tim Burton’s 1988 hit film, and all the new songs added to the narrative could sap all the thrust from the story.
But somehow … someway … it doesn’t.
The national tour now playing the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale is a hammy buffet of laughs and musical anarchy, with snappy lyrics set to a bouncy score — not a particularly memorable one, but bouncy nonetheless.
Fans, and they are legion if evidenced by the number of teens and twentysomethings decked out in goth-chic on opening night, will be relieved that much of the plot here is the same as the movie version that starred Michael Keaton in the title role.
When moody, death-obsessed Lydia (Isabella Esler) teams up with unabashedly nerd-forward — and recently deceased — couple Barbara (Britney Coleman) and Adam (Will Burton), the results lead to otherworldly and netherworldly chaos. Lydia’s widowed father, Charles (Jesse Sharp), is a developer and hopes to score a big deal by using Barbara and Adam’s former residence, where they are still attic-bound ghosts, as a model home for a planned gated community.
Lydia desperately wants to move back to the home she knew when her mother was alive, so when their tepid scare tactics fail, she decides to bring in the big guns, a demonic Beetlejuice (Justin Collette), who has a somewhat unintelligible plan to become human again. Where the show diverts from the movie, and yet totally wholeheartedly works, is that Charles has an on-the-down-low girlfriend, Delia (Kate Marilley), who is also a ditzy life coach for Lydia.
The musical “Beetlejuice” also swerves from the original material by having Beetlejuice narrate the action. No, that’s not quite accurate. Narrate is too staid a word for what happens with Collette’s take on Beetlejuice — emcee in a Vegas late-night cabaret lounge show is more like it, working blue and bawdy. He kills. He is the most-ghost with his lewd wattage set on 10. There are some breathtaking punchlines (no, seriously gasp-worthy) and even a meta-musical jab here and there as Beetlejuice breaks the fourth wall to the visceral and vocal delight of the audience.
The show comes off as a vaudevillian version of Dia de Los Muertos, if you can imagine such a thing. And the design of the production is eye-popping, having won both a Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award in 2019 when it bowed on the Great White Way.
Sure, the story gets a little lost and garbled in the second act as the musical untangles a lot of backstory the movie just glossed over. “Beetlejuice” allllllmost becomes “Nonsensical: The Musical” during that last quarter or so of the 2 1/2-hour running time, including a 15-minute intermission.
It all could have stopped working right then and there.
Fortunately, the show has Esler, who as Lydia sings the score with a soft plea in her voice that blazes into a siren, a shining vocal beacon guiding us through the purgatory of Act Two and giving the production a beating heart.
Somehow, it works.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Beetlejuice”
WHEN: Through June 25
WHERE: Au-Rene Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale
COST: $33.79-$131.92
INFORMATION: 954-462-0222; browardcenter.org
