Today, instead of focusing on all the differences between stage and screen, I want to focus on just one thing the Beetlejuice musical changed from the movie that I think made the musical better for it. (Quick disclaimer: I've only heard the Beetlejuice soundtrack, and haven't seen the full musical. I'm basing this analysis on the music, and what I've read in the synopsis.)
To see just what that difference is, let’s look to the official summaries for a clue.
The IMDB page for Beetlejuice the movie says “The spirits of a deceased couple are harassed by an unbearable family that has moved into their home, and hire a malicious spirit to drive them out.”
“Beetlejuice (1988).” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0094721.
Meanwhile, the Beetlejuice Broadway website describes the musical as “[telling] the story of Lydia Deetz, a strange and unusual teenager whose whole life changes when she meets a recently deceased couple and a demon with a thing for stripes.”
“BEETLEJUICE The Musical.” Beetlejuice Broadway, beetlejuicebroadway.com.
Did you spot the difference?
It all comes down to the protagonist.
The movie is about the Maitlands. It is the story of them adjusting to the afterlife and reclaiming their home.
But the musical is about Lydia.
It’s still about the Maitlands. It’s even about Beetlejuice too, in a way the movie wasn’t. But if I had to peg a single person down as the protagonist of the musical, it would be Lydia.
The choice to make Lydia protagonist makes sense. Of the four main characters (Adam and Barbara Maitland, Beetlejuice, and Lydia) Lydia is the only one alive. Therefore, she’s the only one that can die. She has the most to lose.
It also creates a new emotional core to the story. In the original, Lydia doesn’t really have an arc. Her mom is presumably still dead, but then we don’t know for sure. In fact, a first time viewer could easily miss the confirmation that Delia is stepmother and not her actual mother, and it’s never clearly established whether Lydia’s mother died or left, let alone if Lydia’s still processing the loss.
In the musical version, Lydia’s arc of coming to terms with her mother’s death and rededicating herself to the living adds a heart to the story that it didn’t have before. It’s all fun and games to be a wacky macabre comedy about ghosts and death, but the addition of this idea of grief helps balance out the story.
This is especially important because for the rest of the story, death is treated so lightly. Ghosts are everywhere, and the death of the Maitlands is mostly sad in a “well they should have lived life to the fullest while they had the chance” sort of way, but the fact that they die together, and we don’t see them missing anyone or anyone missing them, makes the deaths a lot easier to grasp. The death of Lydia’s mother is a lot more real. It’s a loss. Lydia and Charles have to grieve. It’s much more like how death is in real life.
That’s why I see it as so important that we never meet the ghost of Emily Deetz. Because people can’t meet the ghosts of their dead loved ones in real life, that can’t happen with the Deetz family.
All this is to say that Lydia’s added plotline adds a deeper meaning and serious heart to an otherwise fun romp through the world of the dead. There are other benefits than just this: for example, Lydia’s increased role helps give the plot more structure. But the deeper meaning is what really elevates the musical beyond just what the movie was into something more.
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So that was my thoughts on how Beetlejuice the musical changed the protagonist for the better. Let me know if you prefer this shorter form of musical analysis, or if you prefer the longer analysis I’ve done in the past. As for next week, stay tuned for a certain historical musical featuring an amnesiac!
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