Eddie Perfect brings Beetlejuice The Musical to Australia
He was nominated for a Tony award for his Broadway score, now Eddie Perfect stars in Beetlejuice The Musical.
He has built an entire musical around Shane Warne, starred in a popular Australian television series and impersonated Alexander Downer, but Eddie Perfect has discovered that the role of Beetlejuice has otherworldly demands.
“I’ve always been a little bit like: ‘I will make the character my own,’ ” Perfect says. “And part of that has been finding the relatable aspects of myself and bringing them to the character. Now that I think about it, maybe some of that was just pure laziness. And now I’m way out of my comfort zone trying to twist myself into different shapes, and it’s one of the most physically demanding and vocally demanding things I’ve ever done.”
Reanimating Michael Keaton’s green-haired, striped suit-wearing demon on stage has proved such a challenge that it has required Perfect to train his vocal chords in a highly choreographed way. (More on that later.)
Despite the workload and the weight of his own expectations, Perfect spoke with The Australian a few hours before the first preview performance of Beetlejuice The Musical, which is now playing in Melbourne.
The year the movie was released, 1988, Perfect was 11, and not allowed to watch it.
“I would’ve seen it maybe a couple of years later on VHS that I would’ve rented from Take One Video in Mentone. And I don’t remember much about the plot but I remember I’d had a strong connection to Tim Burton’s early films, especially Edward Scissorhands,” Perfect says.
“Beetlejuice was really interesting as it tapped into a sort of American gothic aesthetic and I remember the visuals of it more than anything else. This kind of fantastical story of ghosts and demons; a lot of it would’ve gone over my head but what remained was just how visually arresting that world was and how believable and credible and funny, spooky it was.”
The cult film follows the Maitlands, a young couple who are involved in a car accident and realise they have become ghosts. Trapped in their large country home, the Maitlands wish to scare away the new owners, Charles and Delia Deetz, who have arrived from New York with their sullen teenage daughter, Lydia.
The Maitlands consult a handbook for the recently deceased that advertises the services of Betelgeuse, a highly unpredictable bio-exorcist. After his name is called three times, Beetlejuice appears and wreaks havoc in memorable scenes set to calypso earworms by Harry Belafonte.
Compounding Perfect’s credentials for the Australian production is the fact he is the show’s composer and lyricist, not that it made the rehearsal process any easier for him.
“What’s been interesting about this is that writing the show has had almost zero helpful impact on my being able to perform it,” Perfect says. “In some ways it’s probably made things a little bit awkward in the beginning.
“And so I actually don’t really think about the writing of it very much at all. That feels like it belongs to a different period of time and development.”
The idea of a potential Australian tour was floated back in 2020, not long after the original Broadway production had opened. Perfect says he was surprised and flattered when his name was thrown into the ring to play Beetlejuice. He’s aware of the perception he was given the role as a gift.
“I have very high expectations of myself and what I want to do with it. I don’t want to be the (person) who’s been cast in this show because he wrote it. I want to be cast in this show because I can do a good job of it and I can bring something interesting to it.”
Beetlejuice The Musical started bubbling away in 2010 when the producers engaged director Alex Timbers to lead the project’s development. The creative team was focused on two key goals: expanding the role of Lydia to become a lead and ensuring the movie’s offbeat, dark humour would be preserved in the stage version – giant sandworms and all.
“It has this edge and kind of irreverence to it and this dark whimsy, and I think all of us have seen movie adaptations for the stage where the thing that makes it special – the anarchy of it or the tone of it or the level of surprise and specificity – gets scrubbed out of it,” Timbers says.
“And so that was the thing, as a big fan of the Beetlejuice movie, I was most scared about losing.”
This is where Perfect unexpectedly entered the frame. It was 2014, and with the blessing of his wife, Lucy, and several Australian musical and cabaret hits under his belt, the composer decided to spend two weeks in New York to try to crack Broadway.
On the way there he crashed in Los Angeles with his mate Tim Minchin, who let him know the Beetlejuice adaptation was in the works.
Perfect saw plenty of shows while in New York and also managed to land a local agent, John Buzzetti, whose clients included Timbers. On his return to Melbourne, Perfect asked Buzzetti if he could pitch some songs to the Beetlejuice team, which had been spinning its wheels trying to find the right composer. The team politely declined but Perfect wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I was like: ‘I don’t give a f..k about money. I’ll just write two songs for free. Just tell them that. I’ll just send them two songs and then it won’t cost them a cent. And if they hate them, fine. If they like them, then what have they got to lose?’ ”
Perfect wrote and voiced two demo tracks – one that became the show’s madcap opener (The Whole “Being Dead” Thing) and another (Dead Mom) that is Lydia’s signature song. Before he received feedback on those numbers, Perfect dashed out a third for good measure. (All of Perfect’s early ideas for the show are captured for posterity in Beetlejuice: The Demos The Demos The Demos, available on your favourite streaming service.)
At the time Timbers wasn’t aware of Perfect’s work, which included Shane Warne: The Musical, songwriting credits on Strictly Ballroom The Musical, and several seasons of the popular Australian drama Offspring.
In hindsight, it is clear the composer from Melbourne would fit right in.
“The wit and cheekiness and smarts and really clever sense of humour and tonal shifts describe so much Australian comedy, and the fact that he (Perfect) had a foot in the cabaret world and the acting world and the theatre world … It seems obvious we should have started the search there,” Timbers says.
With Perfect on board, Beetlejuice The Musical continued its development, and was bound for Broadway.
In October 2018 came the big test – a tryout season in Washington, DC. It proved polarising.
“What we found out when we got the reviews was that there was a certain half of the audience that just loved it and was like: ‘This is our favourite thing ever.’ And then there was a certain part of the audience that was really pushed away and felt it was very sort of aggressive and raucous and perhaps even raunchy,” Timbers says. (If you Google the show’s name, the “People also ask” section includes a telling question: “How many F-bombs are in Beetlejuice The Musical?”)
The creative team had a hunch the show would find its flock once it transferred to Broadway but wanted to broaden its appeal to welcome as many converts as possible. An 18-page manifesto encompassing every dimension of the show – writing, performance, design – was created to engineer a “bigger emotional on-ramp” for a wider audience to access the show.
The reworked production opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre in April 2019. The critics were not kind.
The New York Times labelled the show as “absolutely exhausting” and a “loud, undifferentiated blur”. But the work Timbers, Perfect and their colleagues had put in began to pay off. Social media also played its part.
“TikTok helped us in that people started to really connect to the performers doing it and the humanity behind it,” Timbers says.
“It wasn’t a brand; it was a group of really amazing artists making the show backstage, onstage.”
Before long, a colourful weekly audience costume contest became part of the Beetlejuice experience.
Despite the harsh notices, the show was nominated for eight Tony awards including best musical, and nods for Alex Brightman as Beetlejuice and Perfect for best original score.
The fans kept showing up but the show became a casualty of Covid, which shut Broadway in March 2020. In a fitting coda for a story about navigating the netherworld, the show would have a second life. Once Broadway reopened, Beetlejuice settled into new digs at the Marquis Theatre in April 2022 before closing in January the following year.
The Australian production is the latest incarnation of the musical, joining the US tour version (on the road since 2022), and productions mounted in South Korea, Brazil, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Japan.
Using a technique known as “ventricular fold phonation”, Brightman learned to vibrate the cartilage that sits alongside the vocal chords, to safely replicate the gravelly tones of Beetlejuice day in and day out.
Earlier this year, when the Australian production began rehearsals, Perfect had a scope inserted into his nose so his vocal chords could be monitored. “The higher you do it in your range, the more taxing it is,” Perfect says.
“I’ve been playing around with all sorts of different versions of it and it’s not just the songs that are hard. It’s like Beetlejuice doesn’t shut up and he’s extreme.” (In the film, Beetlejuice takes his time to appear. In the world of the musical he barely leaves the stage.)
Perfect had a Catholic upbringing and was named dux in his senior year at St Bede’s College in Mentone. The recent death of a close family friend, whose funeral was held at the St Bede’s chapel, allowed Perfect to reflect on the process of creating new work and living a good life.
“Broadway is a really intense place,” he says. “There’s a lot of money at stake and there’s a lot of very hardworking, creative people, and nobody really knows what’s happening. It’s very hard to make a musical but it’s a big collective effort. And it can go very wrong and be massively traumatic.
“But when collaboration works, it’s because there’s love involved in it, and love comes from all sorts of places.”
Happily for Perfect, Beetlejuice The Musical has reached that threshold.
“We are so fortunate to be able to find something hugely challenging, vastly intimidating, eminently silly, endlessly creative and inventive and stupid and ludicrous, and meaningful and meaningless, and to commit our lives to it. And it is such a labour of love that I am just endlessly grateful. That’s what I learned … you got to do it with love.”
Beetlejuice The Musical opens May 17 at the Regent Theatre, in Melbourne until August 3.
More Coverage
Add your comment to this story
Australians nab coveted Tony Award nominations
Australian actor Sarah Snook, who plays all 26 parts in The Picture of Dorian Gray, has earned a coveted Tony Award nomination for her performance in the acclaimed one-woman show.
Truth about Archibald Prize? It’s full of bad portraits
The media have for years been addicted to the cliche that the Archibald Prize is ‘controversial’, but would never dare question the inclusion of any of the truly incompetent pictures – they are generally made by minorities who are today exempt from criticism.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout