Better choose my words carefully; book writer Anthony King and I are mutuals on Mezz. 🤭 (We had a nice chat at Bar Centrale once. If you happen to see this, hey! Hope you’re well.) At this performance, we had understudy Matt Kurzyniec on as the Juice. I had a ton of fun. Adapting a beloved existing property seems hard, especially when it’s so associated with a director like Tim Burton and an actor like Michael Keaton.

I thought this struck a really nice balance of feeling true to the character but not reading as impersonation. To go a little further—Beetlejuice the character is so funny, so vulgar, so magnetic, that—it feels a little counterintuitive to say—the show is at its most entertaining when he’s just freewheeling and we aren’t checking off obligatory story beats. Can feel the writer’s improv background.

Sometimes Mr. Juice has to be off-stage. Isabella Esler’s Lydia Deetz is a pretty charismatic fallback; I think she’s a great find and she’ll probably continue to springboard from here. A lot of her big numbers are pretty traditional, earnest show tunes, with maybe a fun turn of phrase to keep it light. There’s nothing overtly wrong with this, but the train runs on a little less steam in these moments, and it really starts to chug when both leads are away. (Of course, that’s hardly a unique problem to this show.)

Considering this is a stop by the touring company, I had wondered if we might see a low-budget set as in the recent “Mamma Mia!”—but I thought it was pretty good! I never saw the original production, but there are shows on Broadway doing less, for sure.