Rude, chaotic, needy: Why middle-class me loves playing Beetlejuice

Since my earliest memories of film, television and theatre, I have been attracted to chaos-makers. Whether it was Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Genie in Aladdin, or Mork the Ork, Drop Dead Fred, The Cat In The Hat, The Grinch, Larry David, Gremlins and, of course, Beetlejuice, there’s something about mischief and mayhem that immediately grabs my attention. It’s also a noticeable theme in my friendships; I tend to surround myself with folks who grab the snow dome and shake it.

Perhaps, it’s because these characters are the opposite of me.

I’m a middle-class kid from suburban Melbourne who is painfully polite, always uses his manners and apologises when other people bump into me. To this day, I have a severe anxious reaction to breaking rules. I return my shopping trolley, I touch on my myki and I pay my parking fines. But deep down inside me, where it is dark and full of private rhymes and shames, I wish I was Beetlejuice.

My formative years of writing and performing music comedy began with “Angry Eddie”, a hyped-up version of myself who broke the rules, spoke the truth and held the megaphone. I suppose my faith in social rules and the unflappable belief that everyone will get seen to if they just patiently wait their turn has a downside. That downside is repression. In order to be a good little cog in the wheel, it’s necessary to suppress one’s own needs and not make a fuss. Never eat the last biscuit, no matter how much you want to.

Beetlejuice is the opposite. He is all need.

Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s 1988 film, Beetlejuice.Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The task of adapting Tim Burton’s hit 1988 comedy-horror film starring Michael Keaton in the title role into a musical had begun three years before I came on board as a composer/lyricist. The show’s co-book writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, along with director Alex Timbers, reoriented the story to focus on Gothic teen Lydia Deetz and her experience of grief after losing her mother, Emily. By the time I joined the writing team, the challenging goal was to make this Lydia’s story, emotionally speaking, with Beetlejuice our unreliable fourth-wall-breaking narrator and antagonist.

The development of a Broadway musical is extensive and rigorous. I was the last author hired, but it still took five years of writing before Beetlejuice opened out of town in Washington, D.C., in 2018. It would undergo intense rewrites before opening on Broadway at the Wintergarden Theatre on Anzac Day, 2019. Through the process of developing Beetlejuice The Musical, I learned a great deal about my co-creators, about the art of the modern musical, about myself as a human and a writer, about audiences and about death and comedy.

For a start, I adhere to Oscar Wilde’s view that if you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they’ll kill you. Comedy, and black comedy specifically, is perhaps the only way I know how to communicate uncomfortable ideas to an audience. Comedy is a safe way of exploring naturally occurring, dark and “inappropriate” thoughts, fears, anxieties and urges that otherwise stay trapped on the inside of our heads.

Eddie Perfect during rehearsals for Beetlejuice this week.Credit: Joe Armao

We all share these fears to some extent, so there is undeniable catharsis in having our collectively dark and private ruminations aired on stage or screen while we sit in the dark with strangers. We immediately feel less alone, less freakish, our naturally bleak musings (“What if drove through this red light?” “What if I plunged my arm into this chip fryer?” “What if I dropped this baby??!!”) if not exactly normalised, then acknowledged.

Audiences laugh the hardest at the things that are most true.

As a character, Beetlejuice is designed to lead an audience through all of these socially unacceptable but reliably intrusive thoughts (and a few freakishly extreme ideas of his own) because he is essentially made of dark thoughts. He says what we can’t say.

Having said that, we learned that there is, in fact, quite a lot that Beetlejuice could not say because our audience didn’t find it funny. Jokes on religion, some jokes on sex (yes, believe it or not we have a line!), jokes on class and poverty and politics and history all came and went based on audience reaction. But it’s not actually about mitigating prudishness. Audiences laugh the hardest at the things that are most true.

The Broadway development process allows the creators to creep up the back, watching the audience as much as (if not more than) the show itself. Often the craft of developing Beetlejuice felt like designing an emotional ride, constantly fine-tuning against waning focus and confusion while building for momentum, laughs, tears and gasps. It’s an act of sustained manipulation, and when all the laughs and held breaths and stunned silences and delighted squeals are accounted for, it’s satisfying in a way that’s difficult to express.

In dealing with the allegorical elements of Beetlejuice (ghosts, death, the afterlife, oh my!), it remained important inside the fantasy and invention not to betray the essential truths of grief. When someone we love dies, they do not come back.

In an earlier workshop of our musical, Lydia reunited with her mother in the Netherworld. I recall sitting in a Manhattan bar with Scott and Anthony after a workshop showing, all of us discussing why this moment didn’t sit right. There is no resolution to grief. The living do not get to resolve things with the ones they’ve lost. The only comfort and resolution we can find is in connection with the living. Having Lydia find her strength through a reconnection with her dead mother felt like a betrayal to anyone who had suffered loss.

Instead, we reimagined the Netherworld as an endless abyss, a metaphor for death itself: eternal, cold and lonely. As writers, a cul-de-sac can be useful. This one led us to an important insight: our show is about a living girl who wants to be dead, meeting a dead guy who wants to be alive.

Lydia is the one who chooses to unleash Beetlejuice, and Beetlejuice is the chaos necessary for all the other characters to heal and grow. Sure, he’s obnoxious, manipulative and rude (and by Act 2 quite dangerous) but when stiff-upper-lipping, “moving forward” and ignoring grief and pain don’t work, something’s gotta give. As a culture, we need a little Beetlejuice; he coaxes us out of hiding, tests and extends our resilience by making us fight for ourselves and each other, and makes it necessary to face the unfaceable and say the unsayable.

The unfaceable and the unsayable happened to my wife, Lucy, who at the age of eight lost her mother, Mary, in a car accident. Her experience of grief found its way into the character of Lydia; the invisibility my wife felt as a young girl, the space between herself and the world. Through Lucy, I have seen how grief is more than an initial shock from which we eventually recover. Grief evolves; it is a living thing that shadows us through our lives, gradually diminishing then roaring back whenever life events are experienced without that person.

In order to look directly into the darkness, humans need to feel safe. For me, comedy is safety. You can’t be afraid and laugh, as far as I can tell. Beetlejuice (both the musical and the character) was created with the specific purpose of giving an audience permission to sit with the uncomfortable and terrifying reality of death, dying and grief and laugh about it. Because when we laugh at death, we celebrate life. Our loved ones who have left us would want us to live, and live well. So that’s what we should do.
Also, don’t drop the baby.

Beetlejuice opens at The Regent Theatre on May 7.