A Bite To Eat With Alice: Eddie Perfect fish pie

Eddie Perfect shares how Beetlejuice the Musical came back from the dead

ABC News

4 days ago

ABC News

Eddie Perfect shares how Beetlejuice the Musical came back from the dead

Eddie Perfect doesn't mince words: in 2019, he says, Beetlejuice the Musical was "going to die". The show — with music and lyrics by Perfect, and book by Scott Brown and Anthony King — opened on Broadway in late March that year to reviews calling it "dismal and gross", "over-caffeinated, overstuffed and virtually charmless", and "absolutely exhausting". By June, ticket sales had tanked. "There was a bit of a vibe about the show that it was dead on arrival," Perfect, an actor, writer and composer, says. Perfect didn't feel angry about the show's apparent failure. And despite the negative reception, Beetlejuice was nominated for eight Tony Awards that year, including best musical. For the performance at the ceremony, Perfect rewrote the opening number, 'The Whole "Being Dead" Thing', to be about poltergeist Betelgeuse/Beetlejuice crashing the Tonys, incorporating jokes about the awards, Broadway, and even actors in the audience. When the performance — led by the original musical Beetlejuice, Alex Brightman — was uploaded online, it quickly reached millions of views. "People loved the chaos of it," Perfect says. "They were like, 'What is this insane show, with Beetlejuice yelling at Adam Driver for killing Han Solo?'" In the same month, a just-released cast recording also went viral, this time on TikTok. "[TikTok] allowed people to take these frenetic, wild songs with really strong characters and interpret them in their own way," Perfect says. That's when Beetlejuice the Musical's fortunes started to turn around. While in April 2019, the show's weekly ticket sales were just $US600,000 ($900,000), by November, they had reached $US1.48 million ($2.3 million). By the end of that month, Beetlejuice had broken its venue's weekly box-office record. But the change was in more than just dollar figures. Audiences started to turn up wearing stripes in the style of the titular character, or entire wedding dresses like Lydia Deetz, the show's teenage protagonist. The cast and crew started to receive fan art by the crate-full, which they'd plaster over the walls, backstage. "The difference between the first two weeks, and then what it became, was [audiences] walked in totally primed to love the show," Perfect says. "They knew the music, they knew the characters, they were obsessed with it. Beetlejuice the Musical wound up closing at the same time as every other show in New York, with the onset of the pandemic. It triumphantly reopened on Broadway two years later, in 2022, ultimately closing after a successful run of nearly 700 performances. "You have to f***ing fail at the beginning, I think," Perfect says. "Then, people have to discover it, and discover you, and come back and find their own way to you. "I don't feel vindication or anything. I feel relieved I get to stay in the great sandpit of Broadway because, if it had failed, I don't know if anyone would ever have asked me back." Now, the show — and its potent fandom — has finally arrived in Australia, with Perfect in the role of Beetlejuice. Perfect wasn't allowed to watch Beetlejuice when the Tim Burton movie, starring Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis and Michael Keaton, came out in 1988. Aged just 11, he remembers desperately wanting to see it. It's the story of the recently deceased Maitlands (Baldwin and Davis), who try to wrench their home back from nouveau riche interlopers the Deetzes (Catherine O'Hara and Jeffery Jones), with a little help from their teenage daughter, Lydia (Ryder), who can communicate with the dead. It wasn't until Perfect was a teenager in the 90s, browsing his local video store in Mentone, in Melbourne's south-east, that he finally had the chance to rent it on VHS. "What I remember was the incredible visual language of that film," he says. "It was so interesting and magical and wonderful. "And I remember feeling afraid and repulsed by the character of Beetlejuice. As a kid, he represented a decaying, decrepit, gross old man." The gothic aesthetic and attitude of Ryder as Lydia and the suburbia of the world of the Maitlands also felt familiar to Perfect. "It sort of felt like a battle between tastes: suburbia versus a more modernistic view of life and art and culture. "But I don't think I could tell you really what it was about as a kid or what the story was about." About 20 years later, in 2014, the composer started working on the score for the Beetlejuice musical from the back of his home in Brunswick in inner-city Melbourne. He didn't yet know if he had the job but had managed to convince the production company, Warner Bros, and the director, Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), to give him a chance. He wrote two songs — one for Beetlejuice, another for Lydia — free of charge. "I'd been going back and forth between New York [and Melbourne], knocking on the door and not getting anywhere," Perfect recalls. They were 'Dead Mom' for Lydia, inspired by 90s grunge, and what became the musical's opening number: 'The Whole "Being Dead" Thing' — whose music bounces wildly between genres, from polka to death metal to jazz, mirroring Beetlejuice's rapidly changing personality. Perfect worked so hard on them, not only because he'd finally got a shot on Broadway, but because a musical adaptation of Beetlejuice felt like a perfect fit for him. He started out writing and performing his own cabaret shows, before he featured as multiple characters in Casey Bennetto's Keating! the Musical, and as the titular cricketer in his first musical, the award-winning Shane Warne: The Musical. "When it comes to my writing, naturalism is not where I go," Perfect says. "I go to extremes. I love big stories, wild stories, shocking, surprising, dark and funny stories with an emotional centre." Making Beetlejuice the Musical is the kind of opportunity Perfect doesn't think he could've found in Australia at the time. "In Australia, I feel like every musical is an anomaly," he says. "Every musical is an exception to a rule. "A musical comes up because somebody has the motivation to make it happen — usually the writer or the creator. They have an idea, they want to get it made, and then they go and find a way to make it. "I find that that's changing a little bit. I think the attitude to musical theatre is starting to change, especially now that more Australians are participating in creating work that's either travelling overseas or working with creative teams overseas." Months after sending off his two songs, Perfect found out he had the Beetlejuice job, and uprooted to New York, where he also wrote a new score for the critically panned King Kong musical. By this time, he had a better sense of what Beetlejuice was about — especially the musical version written by Brown and King, which re-centres the story around Lydia and her grief at the loss of her mother. During the workshop stage, the collaborators made the choice to avoid easy narrative beats — like, for instance, Lydia reuniting with her mother in the Netherworld. "That's just a fantasy invention; that's a deception for anyone that's suffered grief," Perfect says. "The defining characteristic of grief is that there are no answers. Any advice, comfort, resolution you might get dies with that person. That's why grief is so hard because it is just a silence at the other end." Instead, Perfect says, the only way out of grief is through it — you have to feel it and then honour loss by "living life as f***ing well as you can and as full as you can". All of that is in the musical — along with wildly funny moments (and sand-worm puppets). "[Beetlejuice] allows people to crack open and laugh at that thing that scares us the most," Perfect says. As Beetlejuice, Perfect emphasises the character's loneliness, drawing on what he recalls of his teenage desperation to be both seen and liked. "I just want everyone on stage to like me," he says. "And when you want people to like you, it's quite a vulnerable place to be, and vulnerability makes the character likeable." Taking on the role of Beetlejuice also draws on the skills Perfect developed doing stand-up comedy and cabaret through his 20s — like talking directly to an audience. "It's all about the one-on-one relationship with an audience and guiding people through discomfort into comfort, through danger into safety," he says. "All that stuff I think makes comedy really exciting has all found a home in Beetlejuice." Beetlejuice the Musical is at Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until August 31.

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

Sydney Morning Herald

07-06-2025

Sydney Morning Herald

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings. 'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie. Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.' Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend. The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season. Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay. The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.' Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish. As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2. Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'. '[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.' The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.) 'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame]. 'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.' Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'. Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.' In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.' Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.' Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects. After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight. 'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.' I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.' She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it. 'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.' Loading She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!' Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.

The Age

07-06-2025

The Age

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings. 'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie. Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.' Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend. The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season. Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay. The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.' Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish. As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2. Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'. '[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.' The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.) 'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame]. 'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.' Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'. Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.' In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.' Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.' Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects. After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight. 'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.' I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.' She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it. 'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.' Loading She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!' Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.

A Bite To Eat With Alice: Eddie Perfect fish pie

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Eddie Perfect shares how Beetlejuice the Musical came back from the dead

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

A Bite To Eat With Alice: Eddie Perfect fish pie

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Eddie Perfect shares how Beetlejuice the Musical came back from the dead

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

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