Beetlejuice – The Musical. The Musical. The Musical.
Hollywood Pantages
3-12-26
By Chris Cassone cc@chriscassone.com
Photos and assistance from Dana Benson
Beetlejuice Raises Hell at the Pantages
You only have to say his name three times to summon him. Three more times to send him back where he came from. But after two and a half hours inside the raucous Broadway musical Beetlejuice, now playing at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, the audience was still saying it as they poured out onto Hollywood Boulevard.
The musical, based on the 1988 Tim Burton film, “Beetlejuice,” wisely stays close enough to the movie’s DNA to satisfy fans while expanding the material into a full Broadway spectacle. The result is a noisy carnival of wisecracks, cartoonish afterlife bureaucracy, big pop-rock numbers, and a steady stream of jokes that come so quickly you almost don’t have time to decide whether you should laugh.
Part of the show’s secret is that Beetlejuice joins a modern line of theatrical antiheroes the audience can’t get enough of. Like The Grinch or Elphaba, he receives cheers that would normally be reserved for the hero. But Beetlejuice takes things several steps further. He is crude, intrusive, and gleefully inappropriate, and the show makes no attempt to apologize for him.
Ryan Stajmiger steps into the striped suit without trying to mimic Michael Keaton’s famous performance from the film. Instead, he suggests a distant cousin of that original character. The manic energy is there, the irreverence is intact, and the one-liners fly out of the side of his mouth at a breakneck pace. His vocal delivery leans into a raspy, almost cartoonish character voice that occasionally muddies the lyrics, but the trade-off is personality. You watch him the way you watch a comic demolition expert. Something ridiculous is about to happen.
The show’s emotional grounding comes from Lydia, played with impressive focus by Leianna Weaver. In the middle of all the mayhem , she provides the one element the show genuinely needs: sincerity. Her character’s loneliness gives the musical a pulse, and when the jokes pause long enough for her song “Home,” the room suddenly quiets. The moment lands because the show has earned it.
The unlucky couple who start the story – Barbara and Adam Maitland, played by Kaitlin Feely and David Wilson – provide the engine that sets the entire ghostly plot in motion. A well-meaning pair stalled in life, they manage to electrocute themselves while renovating their house and find themselves assigned to haunt it by the bureaucratic machinery of the afterlife. It’s one of the musical’s sharpest comic ideas: death administered like a government office, complete with rules, forms, and supervisors.
When the living move in – Charles Deetz, his daughter Lydia, and his ambitious partner Delia – the stage becomes a battlefield between the dead homeowners and the new arrivals. Jeff Brooks (Charles) and Bailey Frankenberg (Delia) happily lean into the show’s escalating absurdity, while the production itself keeps piling on visual jokes, fast transitions, and Broadway-sized musical numbers.
The humor ranges from clever wordplay to the sort of deliberately outrageous gags that feel descended from the anything-goes spirit of Blazing Saddles. (“Look at these jugs!”) Not every punchline lands, but the show hardly slows down long enough for that to matter. Velocity is the point.
And that’s really the key to Beetlejuice. It isn’t trying to be elegant. It’s trying to be fun. The production barrels forward with the kind of reckless enthusiasm that Broadway sometimes forgets it’s allowed to have.
By the time the curtain falls, the audience has been pulled through a neon afterlife of jokes, ghosts, and pop-rock spectacle. It may not possess the strange originality the movie once had, but onstage it becomes something else: a loud, mischievous, crowd-pleasing night at the theater.
And judging from the laughter echoing out onto Hollywood Boulevard, the ghost still knows how to raise hell.