Beetlejuice in the West End: did the ghost with the most get roasted by critics?

Alex Wood, WhatsOnStage
★★★

“The good news is: book writers Scott Brown and Anthony King’s take on the irreverent 1988 film has lost none of the cheeky charm that seduced so many American audiences. Replete with new, UK-oriented jokes (a few gags about Paddington drew huge laughs, and quite a few gasps), it redraws Tim Burton’s original material, rejigs the plot and twists the ending into a largely satisfactory paint-by-numbers night out – a perfect replacement for the other musical crowdpleaser based on a cult classic 1980s movie, Back to the Future, which closed last month.”

Chris Wiegand, The Guardian
★★★

“At one point [Beetlejuice (David Fynn)] gives a Scooby Doo-style “ruh roh” and there is an appealing puppyishness beneath his bio-exorcist but his scattershot dialogue as the plot ventures in and out of the Netherworld quickly becomes tiresome. It’s like watching a certain type of Netflix megastar standup desperate to cause outrage. The show is at pains to tell you how wild it is, the host more boorish than creepily grotesque.”

Alice Saville, The Independent

★★★

Clive Davis, The Times

★★★

“Amid the high-energy rock anthems there’s more room too for Lydia Deetz (Nordberg), the ultra-gloomy young girl who befriends the Maitlands, the winsome couple — played by David Hunter and Chelsea Halfpenny – whose accidental death sets the yarn in motion. Faulty electrics are their downfall here. Seeing Lydia mourning the loss of her mother – has there ever been a blunter song title than “Dead Mom“? — gives us a fuller insight into her goth persona. Aimie Atkinson gets some of the best lines as Delia, the dizzy life coach who is having an affair with Lydia’s widowed father, Charles (Alasdair Harvey).”

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

★★★

“If much of it left me cold – Australian composer Eddie Perfect’s generic rock and Broadway pastiche score largely going in one ear and out the other – I also felt like the spectre at the feast: the audience around me audibly loved it. And visually, Alex Timbers’s production has a beautiful sense of hallucinogenic spectacle, complete with copious outbreaks of dance and a fittingly ridiculous giant sandworm. Rather like Beetlejuice, I find myself caught between two positions; on the one hand, life’s surely too short for such convoluted hokum but, equally, who could revile a show that tries so hard to please?”

Sam Marlowe, The Stage