“Beetlejuice” is a howl. The musical theater adventures of the cartoonish demon created for the 1985 film have a gritty grace and a less panicky panache than you might expect, but the results are still highly entertaining and even a little sentimental. The national tour of the hit Broadway production is at The Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford through Sunday.
This is not the movie “Beetlejuice.” It has a different opening, ending and middle, playing fast and loose with plot and characters. It’s not even quite the Broadway “Beetlejuice,” though it’s essentially the same production with the same director (Alex Timbers) and designers.
Some of the show’s biggest special effects have been revised, so there’s less sandworm, less house shaking and a completely different death for two of the show’s main characters, sweet naive Adam and Barbara Maitland. The show, scripted by Scott Brown and Anthony King of “Gutenberg: The Musical” fame, is profoundly different from the movie. All the familiar characters are there, but they can have different functions or priorities.
It’s still about decent people dying, nasty dead people coming back to life and the afterlife being less disturbing in many ways than real-world family issues. The biggest, most obvious and understandable change is the amount of Beetlejuice in it. In the movie, the character doesn’t appear until 25 minutes in and then has only 17 1/2 minutes of screen time in total.
In the stage ver.