'Beetlejuice the Musical': Tucson welcomes 'ghost with the most'

Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most, is one hyperkinetic evil spirit.

In “Beetlejuice the Musical,“ coming to Tucson Dec. 3-8, he bounces around like a kid on a sugar high.

“Beetlejuice isn’t a very sit-down character. He’s very active,” confides actor Justin Collette, who has played the titular role since the Broadway tour launched in 2022.

Collette will let us in on a little secret: It’s our fault.

When Beetlejuice makes his entrance in the opening scene, audiences get all excited like millennial girls spotting Harry Styles at the Walmart.

“The crowd just gets so into it, so it kinda becomes impossible to slow down when you are being cheered on that much,” Collette said.

Broadway In Tucson brings the show to Centennial Hall for eight performances beginning Tuesday, Dec. 3, for what is arguably one of the biggest shows of the presenter’s 2024-25 season.

“Beetlejuice,” which has been making its way around the country since it opened in Kentucky in December 2022, takes its cues from the 1988 Tim Burton movie starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder.

Collette says the stage version is more “like fan fiction of the movie.”

“The plot of the movie, that’s what’s in our story, but the movie is really more of a visual art piece than a big narrative journey,” he explained during a phone call from the show’s New Orleans run last month. “The movie is all like, ‘Is Beetlejuice going to get out?’ The writers, I think, did a really good job. It contains everything that is in the film, but they flesh it out in a new and exciting way.”

The story in the musical focuses more on Lydia Deets (Madison Mosley), the goth teen daughter of an inattentive father Charles (Jesse Sharp) and self-indulgent stepmother Delia (Sarah Litzsinger), who is dealing with the death of her mother while trying to adjust to a new home and the dead couple living in the attic.

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“Lydia, played brilliantly by Maddie Mosley, is what makes my character palatable. She has this beautiful arc where she is dealing with the death of a mother and grieving that,” Collette said. “... It’s heavy stuff. It’s death, it’s a child, it’s your mom and then I get to come out and be like, ’Hey did you ever think about kissing yourself in the mirror?’ I get to be a total id character that doesn’t seem to have any of those connections beside being extremely lonely and bored.”

Director Alex Timbers (“Moulin Rouge”) brings us those larger-than-life visual elements like the creatures and sandworms, recreated with large puppets and fog.

“Alex is so adept at taking these artistically stylish pieces and putting them on stage,” Collette said. “He also is good at directing the audience’s focus. I think a lot of stuff goes on when we’re on stage, but it doesn’t feel chaotic. It just looks like they induced it.”

Part of the humor in “Beetlejuice” comes from Collette’s character breaking the so-called fourth wall. It starts in that opening scene, “Prologue: Invisible and the Whole Being Dead,” when Beetlejuice appears holding a newspaper. As the audience screams like front-row fans at a rock show — which has happened at nearly every performance — Beetlejuice waves from behind the paper.

Throughout the song about “the whole being dead thing,” he sings to the audience, encouraging them to drink their $50 wine “and take a breath” and warning that if “I hear your cell phone ringing, I’ll kill you myself.”

“I think the show is so well-written. It’s so funny,” said Collette, a Canadian native who cut his comedy teeth in Toronto’s improv world before making his Broadway debut in “School of Rock” in 2015.

“Beetlejuice the Musical” earned eight Tony nominations, including Best Musical and Best Original Score after opening on Broadway in April 2019. It closed the following spring courtesy the COVID-19 pandemic and returned in April 2022 for what turned out to be a short run. The show closed for good in January 2023.

“America didn’t get a chance to really see this show,” Collette said. “It was open for only so long and then after COVID, everyone was so broke and who was going to travel to New York and see it?”

In addition to the original score, the musical includes the film’s iconic songs “Day-O” and “Jump In The Line” — two songs that will inspire many in the audience to applaud.

“People are so excited to come and see this story that we connect to and that they’ve known for a long time,” Collette said. “I think that they get so excited that I get wrapped up in their energy.”