Revamped ‘Beetlejuice’ may have the juice for Broadway after all

[edjames]

I have my doubts on this one...I'll keep an eye out, but I doubt I'll be purchasing a full-price seat, maybe TDF...

 

NYPost columnist, Michael Reidel reports:

 

Revamped ‘Beetlejuice’ may have the juice for Broadway after all

 

A Washington Post critic sprayed a can of Raid on the out-of-town tryout of “Beetlejuice” last fall. Peter Marks called the $20 million musical “overcaffeinated, overstuffed and virtually charmless.”

“Beetlejuice,” named for the bawdy ghost of Tim Burton’s 1988 hit movie, was bound to have tasteless jokes, but Marks thought the musical tipped over into “foul directions.”

The show, he concluded, needed “a trip back to the lab where they fix musicals.”

And that’s exactly where it went.

A source tells me that director Alex Timbers sat down with the creative team and went through the show “beat by beat,” expunging all that was tasteless, lewd and inappropriate in the post-#MeToo era. He also demanded better jokes and songs.

“He realized the show as written can’t be done in the cultural landscape we’re living in,” another source says. “He wanted to get rid of what was gross and cheap, and find another way of telling the story.”

The extent of the revamping surprised many theater insiders at a run-through this week. Expectations remain low, frankly, but there’s considerable buzz that “Beetlejuice,” which begins previews March 28 at the Winter Garden, is no longer dead on arrival.

Scott Brown and Anthony King adapted Burton’s screenplay for the stage. King is a comedian who once ran the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy club in New York. Brown is the former drama critic for New York magazine. Their previous collaboration, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” was tedious for adults, hilarious for teenagers.

They brought that sensibility to “Beetlejuice,” but then the Harvey Weinstein scandals came along, and what may have been funny a few years ago is uncomfortable now. One scene featured a Girl Scout selling cookies door-to-door while being chased by male ghosts with their tongues hanging out.

That scene was the first to go.

The female characters in the first draft were “a bit ditzy,” a production source says. Ditzy is gone now as well.

Eddie Perfect, an Australian songwriter, wrote the score. He also wrote the songs for “King Kong,” which isn’t going to win any Tony Awards. Marks called his music “predictably peppy,” with “serviceable power ballads.”

Insiders complained that the score lacked a coherent sound, coming across like a hodgepodge of styles. The show has since been re-orchestrated to meld its calypso, rock and pop styles.

Gone is a boy-band parody that fell flat. In its place is a new number for Miss Argentina, who, after slitting her wrists, was sent to the netherworld to become a bureaucrat.

“If I knew then what I know now,” she says in the show, as she did in the film, “I wouldn’t have had my ‘little accident.’ ”

A source who’s not involved in the show saw the run-through and says, “It’s been revamped for the better,” but added the end is still a little weak.

Not weak are the sets, by David Korins (“Hamilton”), and the puppets, by Michael Curry, who worked with Julie Taymor to create Broadway’s blockbuster “The Lion King.”

Korins’ macabre sets dazzle the eyes, while Curry has taken puppetry to a whole new level with a creature called a sandworm that overwhelms the stage.

But you can’t count on sets and puppets to recoup $20 million: It’s the script and score that make a hit.

[+ nycman]

In other words.....it’s been pastureized, sanitized, and stripped of humor.

 

I hope the sets are interesting.

[edjames]

The reviews are not good. NYPost HATED it!

 

‘Beetlejuice’ review: Musical is a coke-snorting, F-bombing disaster

 

If we say his name three times, will he go away?

 

I’m not talking about the title character of “Beetlejuice,” which opened Thursday night, but Eddie Perfect. Fresh off his heinous music for “King Kong,” the Australian composer’s dismal soft-rock score fuels one of the worst Broadway musicals in years.

 

Make that dismal and gross — like having his 15-year-old heroine sing about her love for “creepy old guys.”

 

The teenager burdened with that schlocky, long song is Lydia (Sophia Anne Caruso), a role made famous by a young Winona Ryder in the 1988 film that starred Michael Keaton. Lydia, her father, Charles (Adam Dannheisser), and his girlfriend, Delia (Leslie Kritzer), have just moved into a house they unknowingly share with the ghosts of the Maitlands. Barbara (Kerry Butler) and Adam (Rob McClure) perish after falling through the floor of their fixer-upper, only to return as novices in the afterlife: inexperienced and dumb.

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.

 

The musical’s best and clearest moments happen to be the excellent movie’s best: “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” when the Maitlands attempt to scare the living by making them sing and dance; and the upbeat “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora).”

 

And so ends the largely awful 2018-19 season. This summer, Broadway needs an exorcism.

The couple loathes the new tenants — Delia, an obnoxious life coach, is turning their charming country home into the Museum of Modern Art — so they call on Beetlejuice, a “bio-exorcist,” to do his dirty work and chase the interlopers out.

 

Trouble is, we met Beetlejuice some 40 minutes before, so there’s no buildup or suspense. Alex Brightman arrives in the opening number as an annoying, lowbrow narrator who lacks Keaton’s sly, unwashed trucker charm. You get sick of this Beetlejuice fast, especially since Brightman plays him like a drug-addicted Krusty the Clown — snorting cocaine off his forearm, making erection jokes and dropping F-bombs. Leave the kids at home.

 

The other wrong turn the show makes is Lydia’s motivation. Here, her goth attire and obsession with the supernatural are a direct — and oft-stated — response to her dead mom. She even sings a song about it called . . . “Dead Mom.” The Maitlands and Beetlejuice, Lydia thinks, can bring her to the netherworld to see her mother once more. This sappy subplot robs the musical of macabre and fits the story as well as O.J.’s glove.

 

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.

[edjames]

Ben Brantley in the NYTimes was kinder, but still panned the show:

 

Review: In ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Afterlife Is Exhausting

 

The dead lead lives of noisy desperation in “Beetlejuice,” the absolutely exhausting new musical that opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater. This frantic adaptation of

is sure to dishearten those who like to think of the afterlife as one unending, undisturbed sleep.

 

Because as directed by a feverishly inventive Alex Timbers, and starring Alex Brightman as the manic ghoul of the title, this production proposes that not being alive just means that you have to try harder — a whole lot harder — than you ever did before. Otherwise, you’ll wind up invisible, with nary a soul to acknowledge your starry self. And in today’s world of chronic self-advertising, this may be the true fate worse than death.

 

Invisibility is definitely not among this show’s problems; overcompensating from the fear that it might lose an audience with a limited attention span is. Though it features a jaw-droppingly well-appointed gothic funhouse set (by David Korins, lighted by Kenneth Posner), replete with spooky surprises, this show so overstuffs itself with gags, one-liners and visual diversions that you shut down from sensory overload.

 

The sum effect suggests

(and, hey, I’ve spent some very happy moments there) as occupied by an especially competitive meeting of the Friars Club. The industrious cast keeps spitting out spoken and sung jokes — good, bad and boring — at the velocity of those armies of bats that regularly swoop over the audience, summoned by the projection designer Peter Nigrini.

 

Mr. Burton’s original film, which cemented his reputation as a Hollywood moneymaker, divided critics when it first came out. (“About as funny as a shrunken head — and it happens to include a few,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times.)

 

But moviegoers swooned for Mr. Burton’s stylized blend of morbid darkness and cartoon brightness, and it remains a cult favorite. Certainly, no one complained that it was understated. The biggest objection from its fans was that Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice — the scurrilous phantom who wreaks havoc among both the living and the dead in a haunted middle-class home — didn’t get enough screen time.

 

The creators of this musical adaptation — led by Eddie Perfect (songs) and Scott Brown and Anthony King (book) — apparently concluded that everything people liked about the film should be multiplied ad infinitum, starting with Beetlejuice himself. But, oh dear fans, be careful what you wish for.

 

Let me say that after Mr. Korins’s set, Mr. Brightman is the best reason to see “Beetlejuice,” which also stars the talented but misused Sophia Anne Caruso as his arch-frenemy, a living teenager with a death wish. Mr. Brightman, who received a Tony nomination for the Jack Black part in the stage version of “School of Rock,” again faces the unenviable task of reinventing a memorable madcap screen performance.

But moviegoers swooned for Mr. Burton’s stylized blend of morbid darkness and cartoon brightness, and it remains a cult favorite. Certainly, no one complained that it was understated. The biggest objection from its fans was that Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice — the scurrilous phantom who wreaks havoc among both the living and the dead in a haunted middle-class home — didn’t get enough screen time.

 

The creators of this musical adaptation — led by Eddie Perfect (songs) and Scott Brown and Anthony King (book) — apparently concluded that everything people liked about the film should be multiplied ad infinitum, starting with Beetlejuice himself. But, oh dear fans, be careful what you wish for.

 

Let me say that after Mr. Korins’s set, Mr. Brightman is the best reason to see “Beetlejuice,” which also stars the talented but misused Sophia Anne Caruso as his arch-frenemy, a living teenager with a death wish. Mr. Brightman, who received a Tony nomination for the Jack Black part in the stage version of “School of Rock,” again faces the unenviable task of reinventing a memorable madcap screen performance.

 

I felt a thrill of relief at that point, a sense that this show might not be a chore to sit through, after all. (I was on guard, as “Beetlejuice” had been roasted to a crisp in an earlier incarnation in Washington.)

 

What follows is an extremely lively introduction to the premise that death is indeed a laughing matter, punctuated with dark, rib-jabbing asides. (“If you die during the performance, this show will not stop.”

 

Still, Mr. Brightman is so electrically, relentlessly on here that you wonder if he can sustain that level of all-out energy. As it turns out, Mr. Brightman and “Beetlejuice” can indeed sustain this anything-for-a-laugh intensity. And it is not a trait that benefits from prolonged exposure.

 

Nearly everything appears to be operating on the principle that it must somehow top what came before. So at the drop of a punch line, the show is suddenly crowded by throngs of ghostly cheerleaders, gospel singers, a dead football team (for a sequence set in hell), not to mention really big puppets (by Michael Curry). There’s even (no, please, make it stop!) a phalanx of cloned, dancing Beetlejuices. (The hyper choreography is by Connor Gallagher.)

 

This being a Broadway musical, “Beetlejuice” has been given a freshly broadened sentimental streak. There’s an enhanced treacly through line, at odds with the prevailing frat-house high jinks, about the search for family. At its center is the lonely, mom-missing Lydia, who resents that her dad, Charles (Adam Dannheisser) has taken up with Delia (Leslie Kritzer, taking zany to the max), a perky but insecure life coach.

 

In parts charmingly originated onscreen by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, the house-haunting, newly dead young couple Adam and Barbara (the talented Rob McClure and Kerry Butler in thankless roles) are shown mourning the absence of the child they never got around to having while they were alive.

 

Ms. Caruso, the precocious teenage actress who was an incandescent presence in the David Bowie musical “Lazarus,” lacks the devilish, deadpan piquancy that Winona Ryder brought to the same role in the film. When this Lydia sings about a place called home, you can imagine what Britney Spears might have been like in the title role of “Annie.”

 

The music mostly exists in a loud, undifferentiated blur. That includes, I am sorry to say, “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” in which the denizens of a dinner party find themselves possessed by a calypso spirit.

, the incongruity of stuffy, dressed-up philistines making like Jamaican backup dancers was a hoot.

 

Here, everybody, including every member of the support cast, has already gone so far over the top that there’s no room for comic contrast. The disheartening moral of “Beetlejuice” is that when anything goes, nothing much registers in the end.