What a bold departure from the original source material!

Beetlejuice’s words, not mine.

Right at the start, the mischievous ghoul breaks the fourth wall to inform us that Beetlejuice The Musical. The Musical. The Musical. is telling its own story.

For once, he’s not lying.

Opening with a funeral, Beetlejuice immediately veers away from the story beats set by the original 1988 movie.

When young couple Barbara and Adam Maitland unexpectedly die, their quest to eject the family that moves into their house gives them a common goal with young Lydia Deetz, who resents being pulled out of her childhood home so soon after the death of her mother.

This more grounded approach to Tim Burton’s gothic dark comedy allows it to plumb greater emotional depths. Keeping its predecessor’s zany energy, the boisterous Beetlejuice exorcises the original’s spiteful tone.

Beetlejuice certainly isn’t scared of its source material. This off-kilter romp is as impressively blue as the original, parading a string of homages across the stage that will delight even the most casual Beetlejuice viewers.

You won’t need to have seen the 1988 film, either — unless you have the same audio issues that plagued Tuesday’s opening minutes.

The great ghoul himself was too quiet; as act one went on, the volume fluctuated between balanced and nearly unlistenable. While it was mostly fine post-intermission, some characters, like Lydia, never quite stopped being drowned out by the music. Such a quiet opening scene means newcomers likely got lost in the shuffle.

It’s a shame. Full of contrasting colors and dreamlike visuals, Beetlejuice is stuffed with the bizarre, the macabre, and the hysterically funny.

And who’s funnier than Beetlejuice’s titular ghostie?

Inserting himself into the Maitlands’ (after)lives and Lydia’s family drama, Beetlejuice wants nothing more to be human and he’s willing to do anything — even marry a teenager for a ghostly green card — to make it happen.

Raunchy and hateable, crass and dateable, cruel and...strangely vulnerable?...Justin Collette is fantastic as Beetlejuice. Gleefully contorting his voice and leaping across the stage as the embodiment of magical mischief, he earned theater-wide laughs all show long for his antics.

Beetlejuice is a firmly PG-13 kind of ghoul. After uttering one-too-many swears, two women farther down my row stood up and left, only to make the walk of shame back to grab the coats they left behind. My sympathy stops at the door: at Broadway prices, they should have checked the content advisory.

For his best bits, Beetlejuice needs foils; the Maitlands, bits and all, are perfect for the role. The ghost’s frequent jabs often come back to bite him, defusing the mean spirit’s mean-spirited jokes.

Despite playing the show’s most purposefully average characters, Megan McGinnis and Will Burton charmed their way out of irrelevance as Barbara and Adam Maitland.

Beetlejuice’s true foil is Lydia Deetz (Madison Mosley), the goth teen who wants nothing more than to be reunited with her beloved, recently deceased mother. Beautiful vocals and great energy exacerbated the frustration that she was often the most difficult to hear.

Among the great additions or alterations to the musical are Sarah Litzsinger’s Delia, a life coach whose attempts to cheer the moody teen up are a mix of chalkboard-scrapingly awkward and hysterically endearing. Miss Argentina (Hillary Porter) heads up Hell’s best song-and-dance number. There wasn’t a bad voice, nor a flubbed line, in the bunch.

With practical special effects that capture the movie’s madcap pre-CGI physical comedy, costumes to die for, and every lighting cue and sound effect building the show’s manic energy to a captivating crescendo, Beetlejuice is a masterclass in Broadway maximalism.

Anyone with even a passing interest in stagecraft should run, not walk, to see how the musical’s complex set attains warped Burtonesque whimsy.

Caught up in all the elements coming together, you hardly notice the second act’s stuttering pacing until you’re leaving the theater. A beautiful emotional climax for Lydia’s character makes up for the rest.

Without ever uttering the word “sorry,” the Beetlejuice musical’s decision to address the demon’s marriage to the underage Lydia fixes where the film went wrong.

Like Spamalot’s reinterpretation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before it — which revised a gag where a gay character is thrown to his death for his sexuality into an over-the-top celebration of homosexuality — Beetlejuice shifts its source material to be more in line with today’s views.

This tongue-in-cheek approach is an underrated way of addressing a beloved property’s moral failings, jumpstarting the conversation by showing what the next step can look like. 

Perhaps Beetlejuice goes a little overboard in expressing how much it doesn’t agree with the most grating sexism and grooming of Burton’s original, but that’s just fine.

Nothing about Beetlejuice is subtle — and it makes for a great musical number.

When you want a high-octane musical to boggle your mind and cross your eyes, few do it better than Beetlejuice.

First Published February 28, 2025, 2:00 p.m.