Beetlejuice musical review: I’ve never heard West End fans scream this loud
Beetlejuice musical review and star rating: ★★★
It’s rare to experience screaming so loud that it feels as if some terrible force is pressing against your eardrums. It happened at Taylor Swift’s show Wembley Stadium and last night at Beetlejuice: The Musical’s West End premiere, where after every song – whether it was good or not – the crowd expelled a carnal screech. Following a run on Broadway, composer and lyricist Eddie Perfect’s musical adaptation of Tim Burton’s cult classic film is technically brilliant but often overwhelming.
Burton’s cult last expressed their intense devotion at the Design Museum’s 2024 exhibition dedicated to the director, featuring original drawings and props. The World of Tim Burton became the highest selling show in the museum’s 35-year history, selling 32,000 advance tickets before the doors had opened. In 2024, his sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a commercial and critical success, grossing $452 million from international audiences (the average takings of a similar blockbuster is somewhere between $250 and $300 million).
In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if Beetlejuice: The Musical is any good. Fans will love this rehash of the film, which follows a teenage girl who connects with the ghosts who haunt her house, in particular one lonely weirdo called Beetlejuice, played by Michael Keaton in the film.
Beetlejuice musical: overstimulating
For the non-die-hard it can often be a strangely anodyne viewing experience, despite the obvious high production value. The show looks a million dollars at the vast 1,727 seater Prince Edward Theatre, and the cast are each as much of a triple threat as the next, including David Fynn’s Beetlejuice, but the reality is that sometimes with these megawatt productions, all the pieces are there but the viewing experience feels disattached.
Much of that can be linked to the score, which features no ear worms, as well as the comedy lines, which too often don’t quite land – at least in terms of the ones geared towards the adults. That issue defangs Beetlejuice, both the character and the show, somewhat. Chasity Crisp’s Juno and Hannah Nordberg’s Lydia Deetz stand out with snarkier, meatier roles.
Overall it is visually overstimulating, a roll-call of high-energy skits that lose their potency due to the sheer amount of them (the show comes in at just shy of three hours).
Beetlejuice: The Musical is unlikely to make the case for this eccentric story about warring ghostly and human factions if the film already hasn’t.
The Beetlejuice musical plays at the Prince Edward Theatre until April 17 2027