Beetlejuice, The Musical, Michael Cassel Group and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures, Regent Theatre, til September 11.

 

Adapting Tim Burton's 1988 film into a musical, Scott Brown and Anthony King's script narrows the focus onto the titular Beetlejuice (notoriously only on screen in the movie for 17 minutes) and Lydia Deetz, the Winona Ryder character - making both key actors in the way the Beeetlejucie animated series did, while giving Lydia a strong sung desire to connect to her late mother as an emotional backbone to the story. With Eddie Perfect's songs giving a varied range of material from Lydia's power ballads to a fun back-and-forth duet on "Say my Name" to a bonkers bouncy showtune on "Creepy old Guy", some thoughly character-appropriate costuming from broadway legend William Ivey Long, a set design combined with projection work from David Korins and Peter Nigrini that allows the supposedly simple house set to transform looks instantaneously as the plot requires. 

Eddie Perfect is a weird case of a creator appearing in their own work - in music theatre, we've not seen Tim Minchin appear in "Matilda" or "Groundhog Day" and Kate Miller-Heidke sat out "Muriel's Wedding" - but in many ways it's the perfect mix of performer and material - Perfect's irreverent tunes in his previous cabaret work and in his "Shane Warne" musical suit him as a performer as well, and he taks the reigns and is a suitably chaotic narrator, nemesis and semi-protagonist, keeping us entertained the entire time. Karis Oka matches him, bringing emotional intensity to her solo "Dead Mom" and also playfulness to her dealings directly with Beetlejuice anywhere else, whether trading off with him in "Say My Name" or "That Beautiful Sound" or playing with the ick in "Creepy Old Guy". Elise McCann adds to her stockiple of great solid leads with another thoroughly charming female lead as the coming-into-her-own Barbara Maitland, and Rob Johnson gradutes from a run of utility performer roles like his "Calamity Jane" part to a strikingly dorky, charming Adam Maitland. Erin Clare is a charming weirdo as Delia, and Tom Wren goes from uptight to insane to sympathetic as the role of Charles requires. 

Alex Timbers directs with verve and action for most of the show (though there are a couple of points where the second act gets a bit stuck having to do inevitable plot-stuff to get us through to the finale), and it's a lively fun musical that knows its source and delivers what an audience wants even if it's not letter-perfectly reproducing the original, instead boiling it down to its essence and hitting the core beats while playing around to give us something surprising at the same time.