“Beetlejuice The Musical” at Prince Edward Theatre
Franco Milazzo in the West End
★★★☆☆
31 May 2026
Let us cut to the chase: no matter what the critics say, audiences will lap Beetlejuice The Musical up like the first ice cream of summer. And, no matter what its many, many fans say, critics will still die a little inside when they see shows like this latest screen-to-stage slice of amiable but misguided nonsense.
David Hunter, David Fynn and Chelsea Halfpenny.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
The show is loosely based on the family-friendly 1988 film in which Michael Keaton donned the famous green wig and striped suit a year before he wore a very different outfit for Batman. It started life as a workshop a decade ago and played for 366 performances at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre before Covid intervened. A legion of adoring musical theatre aficionados latched onto its saccharine songbook during the pandemic, leading to two more Broadway runs, so after much hype and city-wide advertising it now opens at the Prince Edward Theatre with the same creatives but a new front man.
In Tim Burton’s eighties opus, Beetlejuice is absent for the first half hour, but book writers Scott Brown and Anthony King and composer/lyricist Eddie Perfect serve up their desperate demon as soon as the curtain is raised. He is still looking for a living person to say his name three times, but is now a fourth-wall-breaking, sexually fluid, immortal, potty-mouthed chaos agent unafraid to flaunt provocative opinions. This combination may seem familiar to the cineastes amongst you but, to paraphrase Juliet, a Deadpool by any other name is just as sweet.
The basics of the film are all present and correct: recently deceased couple the Maitlands powerlessly watch on from the attic as the Deetz family brashly moves into their house and proceeds to tear it apart in the name of improvement. Beetlejuice offers his assistance in ejecting the Deetzes and, before long, there’s the famous scene where the living are possessed and forced to sing and dance to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”.
Where Brown and King make a serious departure is in introducing new emotional beats. Or rather just one, over and over: failed or absent parental love. The teenage Lydia Deetz (Hannah Nordberg) still deeply mourns her recently passed mother and is forced to watch as her father Charles (Alasdair Harvey) pushes on with a new home and a relationship with life coach Delia (Aimie Atkinson). The Maitlands (Chelsea Halfpenny and David Hunter) were looking forward to parenthood before their demise. Even Beetlejuice gets in on the act, bemoaning the lack of love shown by his mother Juno (Chasity Crisp).
Hannah Nordberg.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Quite why the show’s legion of young stuck-at-home Gen Z admirers latched onto this particular theme is anyone’s guess, but it feels almost as unwelcome here as the Deetzes themselves. Even for a musical, injecting this much gloopy sentimentality into a revered work should, frankly, be outlawed.
An equally awkward disconnect is that of the target audience. The film was firmly intended for family viewing; this musical clearly has other ideas. The constant effort to shamelessly ingratiate itself with a British crowd surfaces in various ways: here, a David Attenborough impression; there a Radio 2 tote bag. The most memorable interjection arrives early on when Beetlejuice gives us his opinion on a recent smash-hit musical, declaiming it with the pithy “Fuck Paddington”. That’s not the only time Beetlejuice lets rip and, despite the age recommendation being “12+ with adult supervision”, this is hardly tween material.
Alex Brightman originated the role on Broadway and in the West End we get David Fynn who, despite being at the mercy of Alex Timbers’s rat-a-tat direction and unwieldy sentences, is a real dynamo. He demonstrates staggering energy and split-second timing. The show is booking until next April and only time will tell just how sparky he will be by then, but he is by some considerable distance the best thing about it.
Although Beetlejuice is the name on the marquee, it is Lydia who tops the programme’s cast list. And rightly so. She is the dramatic heart of the story and Nordberg, an American actor whose TV credits include HBO’s Euphoria, makes her major stage debut with considerable aplomb and maturity. Whether performing a phenomenal solo on “Dead Mom” or sparring with Fynn in the entertaining “Creepy Old Guy”, she is an absolute treat to watch.
The two co-producers make their presence felt in very different ways: the big-budget set design reflects the deep pockets of the Warner Brothers empire while the campy feel is traceable to Crossroads Live’s sibling firm Crossroads Pantomime, which touts itself as the world’s biggest pantomime producer. That combination – Hollywood money and cabaret knowingness – describes the show’s pleasures and its limitations in roughly equal measure.
What you are left with is a production that is less than the sum of its parts. David Korins’s design is inventive, Fynn is tireless, and Nordberg is a genuine star in the making. But Brown and King’s determination to sand down Burton’s anarchic, plot-indifferent original into a sweary grief narrative is a misreading of what made the film worth adapting in the first place. Beetlejuice was always funny because it didn’t care; this version cares rather too much. Come for the performances and the spectacle, leave before you start asking whether any of it needed to exist.
