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.
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