If you’re only going to see one musical this season, let it be Beetlejuice

MUSICAL THEATRE
Beetlejuice ★★★★★
Music and lyrics: Eddie Perfect, Book: Scott Brown and Anthony King
Regent Theatre, until August 3

If you can only afford one ticket this musical theatre season, Beetlejuice is the show to see. The highly anticipated Australian premiere nailed it on opening night, with Eddie Perfect leading an offbeat triumph of camp gothic – one that dives into a bottomless abyss of musical comedy and compulsively erupts into infectious mayhem. It’s terrific fun.

Karis Oka and Eddie Perfect in a scene from Beetlejuice.Credit: Joe Armao

Perfect wrote the music and lyrics for this Broadway adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton classic, keeping the dark cartoonish quality that makes Burton’s work so distinctive, and tweaking the story to allow all the humour and havoc to play a greater role in rectifying emotional disorder.

It is, as Beetlejuice sings with ghoulish glee from the outset, a show about death, and there’s liberating excess in the black comic relish the musical takes in skewering the fakery of false positivity, or the denial and repression of sadness and rage.

For grieving goth teen Lydia Deetz (Karis Oka), her mother’s death has left her feeling invisible. Her father (Tom Wren) refuses to talk about it, and he’s seemingly moved on to Delia (Erin Claire), a kooky life coach whose modish psychobabble and uplifting platitudes Lydia finds repellent.

The Deetz family is a haunted house, emotionally speaking, and when they move into a house that’s actually haunted, the door to the Netherworld opens, and a reckoning awaits.

Everything about Beetlejuice is super-slick and timed to perfection.Credit: Joe Armao

Previous occupants Barbara and Adam Maitland (Elise McCann and Rob Johnson) were a normcore suburban couple who died in a household accident. The wily demon Beetlejuice – who specialises in exorcising the living – intends to use these newlydeads to help summon him into the world.

All he needs is for a mortal to say his name three times, promising to help scare the Deetzes away in return. No one counts on Lydia – a girl with an unusually morbid imagination – being able to see the dead, though, and as she forges an alliance with Beetlejuice and the Maitlands, her course of mourning unleashes the freakiest of fright nights.

Everyone from a Pollyanna-ish girl scout (Rebecca Ordiz) to a dead beauty queen (Angelique Cassimatis) – not to mention Beetlejuice’s own chain-smoking mother (Noni McCallum) – gets in on the action as the door to a bureaucratic underworld opens, and Lydia must find a way to cope with her loss before all hell breaks loose.

Everything about Beetlejuice is super-slick and timed to perfection. The musical is so jam-packed with visual gags and satirical lyrics and outre musical hijinks you’d probably need to see the show twice to catch them all.

Eddie Perfect is in his element as an equally appealing and offensive agent of chaos.Credit: Joe Armao

Perfect is in his element as an equally appealing and offensive agent of chaos, poking fun at every musical theatre rule with scruffy charisma, riding a hometown vibe with some of the ad-libbed jokes.

Opposite him, Oka is ideally cast as Lydia, playing the show’s beating black heart with a winsome but slightly vicious undertone that might just bring about a goth revival and certainly won’t disappoint fans of Winona Ryder in the original movie.

McCann and Johnson leap into parody as a couple diminished by suburban life – channelling shades of Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror, only, well, dead. And camp comedy is embraced with wild abandon by the supporting cast.

Dinner party guests are possessed into performing Harry Belafonte songs; Claire’s ditzy Delia butts heads with the goth heroine in a duet that pits mindless positivity against nihilistic angst; and an entire chorus of Beetlejuices conquers the stage with gruesome … glamour is not the word.

Pigs’ genitals might have been removed from the show, but Beetlejuice still revels in rebelling against the appropriate and its highly orchestrated chaos does, in the end, achieve comic catharsis.

We are all strange and unusual, after all, and never more so than when we refuse to admit how fleeting life is, or to embrace life knowing we’re all going to die.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Theremin and Beyond ★★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, May 17

German theremin virtuoso Carolina Eyck is a musical conjurer. Making mysterious hand gestures between the two antennas of her electronic instrument, she seemingly creates music out of thin air. Named after its Russian inventor, the theremin led the way in electronica.

German theremin virtuoso Carolina Eyck performs with the ACO.Credit: Nic Walker

Because of its eerie sounds, the theremin has been a godsend for movie and television composers. Surely, Midsomer’s reputation as the most murderous place in England could not have been cemented without its spooky theremin theme, nor would Hitchcock’s Spellbound be so compelling without composer Miklos Rozsa’s appropriation of the instrument.

In this eclectic program, the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrated the theremin’s place in popular culture, creating a party atmosphere with The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, Morricone’s music for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and an arrangement of the Star Trek theme.

Classical repertory was not neglected with empathetic accounts of Bach’s so-called Air on a G String, extracts from Saint-Saens’ The Carnival of the Animals including its celebrated swan, and at the other end of the spectrum, a clever take on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. Glinka’s The Lark also appeared – the song with which Theremin introduced his invention to Lenin.

Holly Harrison’s Hovercraft, commissioned by the ACO for Eyck, brilliantly opened up the expressive capabilities of the theremin as did Eyck’s own composition Strange Birds.

In this eclectic program, the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrated the theremin’s place in popular culture.Credit: Nic Walker

Reduced to some 10 players, the ACO strings led by Richard Tognetti provided diverse connective tissue with works by Brett Dean, Erwin Schulhoff and Shostakovich’s Japanese friend Yasushi Akutagawa.

Enlivened by the colourful addition of pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska and percussionist Brian Nixon for much of the program, rhythmic interest also came with Offenbach’s famous Can-Can and Jorg Widmann’s 180 Beats per Minute.

Eyck is a highly talented performer and in this not-too-serious program, she did conjure up some musical magic.
Reviewed by Tony Way

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