Go ahead and say “Beetlejuice” three times. The beloved demon is in good hands as the musical theater version of his story hits Hartford on tour this month.
Alex Timbers has brought a special type of creativity and experimentation to Broadway, a place that doesn’t always know what to do with such inventive touches. It helps that he loves comedy and is not into pretension or intellectual posturing.
Two of Timbers’ recent Broadway hits were on the 2023-24 Broadway series at The Bushnell: “Moulin Rouge” in November and now “Beetlejuice: The Musical. The Musical. The Musical” running May 28 through June 2.
The director’s style was initially formed as an undergraduate at Yale University. After taking a class in experimental theater and being “confused by the pretension” of much of what he was seeing, he and some friends devised a student production at Yale’s then-new off-Broadway space near Toad’s Place in New Haven that blended dance with literary analysis and handed out course packets as playbills. That production led to some remarkable productions off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway and ultimately to work his magic on Broadway-friendly fare.
Comedy has always been an element of his work, even in his recent collaboration with David Byrne and Fatboy Slim on “Here Lies Love.” He remembers taking offense at a New York Times review of one of his early off-Broadway works, which deemed it “sophom*oric — as if that was a bad thing. I thought ‘No! We should be proud of that aspect!'”
He talked about his latest hit, “Gutenberg: The Musical,” which he first directed off-Broadway in 2006, as finding a space for old comedy on Broadway.
“‘Gutenberg!’ is really silly but has a ton of heart,” he said. “‘Beetlejuice’ is about death but is really about living.”
His other comedy breakthroughs on Broadway include “The Pee Wee Herman Show” in 2010 and “Oh Hello on Broadway,” written by and starring Nick Kroll and John Mulaney.
Timbers explained how he rethought “Beetlejuice” for Broadway and again for the tour.
“When we started the process in 2013, we wanted a haunted house show,” Timbers said. “The house is a character that keeps changing.”
He was also intrigued by building a show around a con artist, noting the long theater tradition of swindlers on stage. Several characters in “Beetlejuice” fit that profile. There’s quite a lot of deception in the story, supernatural or otherwise.
The musical version acknowledges that Beetlejuice has a long legacy that’s greater than the original 1988 horror comedy directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, Wynona Ryder, Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. Timbers said he grew up on the animated “Beetlejuice” TV series, which ran from 1989 and 1991 and put the characters through dozens of new adventures. There were also comic books, video games and some live concerts at the Universal Studios theme park in Florida.
Beetlejuice was created by horror novelist Michael McDowell, who co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Warren Skaaren. A movie sequel has been in the works for a long time. Its completion was delayed by the COVID pandemic and it is finally scheduled for release this September, making the musical’s tour particularly timely.
The musical has the same general plot as the movie: A couple of newly made ghosts, Adam and Barbara Maitland, haunt a house where the mortal inhabitants are scarier than they are. A sensitive teen, Lydia, is caught up in the conflict, which is resolved chaotically by the titular striped-shirted demon in the garish makeup. Both the movie and the musical take place in the fictional town of Winter River, Connecticut, though the film and its sequel were both filmed in Vermont and both contain the Harry Belafonte standard “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”
But there are many differences. There’s much more of Beetlejuice in the musical than in the movie. Plus, “in our version, the Maitlands aren’t the ones who go to the Netherworld, it’s Lydia and her dad,” Timbers said.
The musical has jokes, routines and effects that are unique to this version. Of course, there are also a lot of songs by Australian singer/songwriter Eddie Perfect, with titles like “The Whole Being Dead Thing (Parts 1-4),” “Say My Name” and “Dead Mom.” The musical’s book is by Scott Brown and Anthony King, who also did “Gutenberg: The Musical.”
Timbers, whose first Broadway musical directing credit was an adaptation of “Rocky,” deliberates looks for ways to make a story feel fresh as a theater piece. This involves a sense of every element of the show, not just an attempt to restage a movie in a live manner. He said he’s creating “a companion piece, not a souvenir booklet. It’s not a beat-for-beat replica.”
The design for “Beetlejuice” was crucial, Timbers explained. “We were celebrating Burton’s art but not making it too high-tech. Those have been the fundamentals for the touring production as well.”
At the first out-of-town tryouts at the National Theatre in Washington D.C. in 2018, “the feedback we had was really polarized,” Timbers said. He found reviews from the local critics to be “not useful,” since they broke down over generational lines and personal taste. “So we did a survey of audiences and got a ton of data. An extraordinary thing happened after that. Everybody got together and created a hit list of what needed to be solved. I was transparent: ‘Here’s where we need to go together. Let’s hold hands and get it done.’ The thing I love about musical theater is that it’s so collaborative.
“We ultimately made the show more emotional, more accessible. We made it more universal. It was not about ‘I like a certain kind of comedy,’” Timbers said.
“A lot of people see themselves in Lydia’s story,” he says of the outsider teen whose parents are among the many people in her life who don’t understand her.
As with “Moulin Rouge” and other Timbers productions, when a new performer takes over a role there is no pressure to mimic what their predecessor did. New interpretations, Timbers said, are “what keeps it alive.” He also points out that the Beetlejuice actors are chosen in part on their improv skills and that King, the book’s co-author, was the artistic director of the improv sketch comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade. Some of the plot changes are “in the mode of fan fiction.”
“My background, being undergrad at Yale, was improv,” said Timbers, who was a member of the school’s long-running improv troupe The Viola Question. He also directed two popular modern farce plays on campus, Peter Shaffer’s “Black Comedy” (which he staged in a squash court) and “Lend Me a Tenor.”
As for what he’s up to now, Timbers said he’s “taking the year off to focus on developing some new projects,” and has no Broadway openings scheduled. Happily, the dead and undead “Beetlejuice” lives on on tour.
“Beetlejuice: The Musical. The Musical. The Musical” runs May 28 through June 2 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $43-$203. bushnell.org.
