Five Things To Love About Beetlejuice
The Whole Being Dead Thing
The show’s opening number, The Whole Being Dead Thing, is the best first song in a Broadway show since Welcome to the Renaissance in Something Rotten. When Alex Brightman starts belting out the show’s 11 o’clock number right out of the gate you know you’re in good hands.
Eddie Perfect
Here’s a songwriter who's taking a serious stab at living up to his name. Did I quote any of the lyrics from The Whole Being Dead Thing yet? No? Well, here you go:
Don’t be freaked,
stay in your seats
I do this bullshit, like,
eight times a week
So just relax, you’ll be fine,
drink your fifty-dollar wine
And take a breath –
Welcome to a show about death!
I raise my fifty-dollar wine to you, Mr. Perfect. Well played.
Sophia Anne Caruso
Caruso invests her Lydia with a drolly dour sensibility – world-weary, over it all, but in on the joke all the while. This is a seventeen year old who understands what it is to be a seventeen year old and knows how to show us that seventeen-year-old truth. At age seventeen.
Kerry Butler & Rob McClure
Butler & McClure have just about nothing to do here; but they’re so darn likeable and such go-to Broadway troupers that watching them do nothing is really something.
The Set
Amped-up, over-the-top, color-splashed and puppet-packed, designer David Korins and director Alex Timbers have created something altogether ooky here. Wait – creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky – that’s another creature-featuring musical altogether, isn’t it? Still, though – ooky it most definitely is.