Based on Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s 1988 cult classic scored by Danny Elfman, the stage adaptation (with music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect) wisely expands the title character’s presence while deepening Lydia Deetz’s grief-stricken arc. What was once a macabre comic subplot in the film becomes the musical’s emotional engine: a story about a teenager mourning her mother, feeling unseen in her own home, and forging an unlikely bond with a demon who is just as desperate for attention.
From the first warped sightline of David Korins’ funhouse set - all crooked beams and skewed geometry, as if the entire house were tilting into the afterlife - the production announces itself as spectacle. The design, famously built without right angles, feels like Burton’s aesthetic cracked open and reassembled for the stage. Projections swirl. Walls morph. The underworld pulses with lurid color. Ken Billington’s lighting design oscillates between eerie shadow and retina-searing strobe; at moments the flashes are intentionally discombobulating, but always in service of the show’s fever-dream logic. It is chaos, meticulously engineered.
Ryan Stajmiger, as Beetlejuice, is the ringmaster of that chaos, a combination of feral, hilarious, and disarmingly sharp. He barrels through fourth-wall breaks with a comic instinct that feels dangerously alive, tossing off meta jokes and current-event barbs that land every time. The performance is raunchy without becoming lazy, sly without losing momentum. He understands the role’s central paradox: Beetlejuice must be both grotesque and oddly lovable, a carnival barker of the dead who still longs to matter and be adored.
Opposite him, Leianna Weaver’s Lydia (a San Diego native, greeted Sunday with audible hometown pride) supplies the heart. Her vocals soar with raw clarity, but it is her stillness that lingers, the way she lets grief sit in her body before unleashing it into song. In a musical that revels in excess, she gives us restraint. The result is a Lydia who feels contemporary and wounded rather than merely “strange and unusual.”
David Wilson (Adam) and Kaitlin Feely (Barbara) ground the show’s supernatural hysteria with endearing awkwardness, making the Maitlands’ existential panic relatable. Jeff Brooks brings unexpected warmth to Charles Deetz, transforming what could be a caricature of oblivious fatherhood into something more human. Bailey Frankenberg’s Delia, all flamboyant delusion and comic bravado, provides one of the evening’s most reliable laugh engines.
The dinner party sequence, of course, is the showstopper. Fans of the film remember the iconic possession scene; onstage, it becomes an athletic, full-company explosion of choreography, puppetry, and comic timing. It is both homage and reinvention, leaning into theatrical absurdity rather than cinematic realism. That willingness to change - to expand jokes, sharpen character motivations, and let Beetlejuice narrate his own mischief - is what makes the musical more than nostalgia. It is adaptation as escalation.
Outside the theatre, the city leaned in. Broadway San Diego amplified the tour’s presence, and nearby spots, including the historic The US Grant, rolled out themed cocktails and pre-show specials, turning the Civic Theatre corridor into a kind of striped pilgrimage route. It felt less like a stop on a tour and more like an event.
Underneath the camp, the strobes, the sandworms and the meta asides, Beetlejuice remains unexpectedly wholesome. It is about grief. About invisibility. About what it means to be seen, even by the dead. That tension between morbidity and sincerity is what gives the show its strange buoyancy. Yes, it is a “show about death,” as the opening number gleefully proclaims. But on Sunday night in San Diego, it felt unmistakably alive.
And for a touring production to leave that impression - technically impeccable, vocally muscular, and emotionally resonant - is no small feat.
David Wilson (Adam) and Kaitlin Feely (Barbara) ground the show’s supernatural hysteria with endearing awkwardness, making the Maitlands’ existential panic relatable. Jeff Brooks brings unexpected warmth to Charles Deetz, transforming what could be a caricature of oblivious fatherhood into something more human. Bailey Frankenberg’s Delia, all flamboyant delusion and comic bravado, provides one of the evening’s most reliable laugh engines.
The dinner party sequence, of course, is the showstopper. Fans of the film remember the iconic possession scene; onstage, it becomes an athletic, full-company explosion of choreography, puppetry, and comic timing. It is both homage and reinvention, leaning into theatrical absurdity rather than cinematic realism. That willingness to change - to expand jokes, sharpen character motivations, and let Beetlejuice narrate his own mischief - is what makes the musical more than nostalgia. It is adaptation as escalation.
Outside the theatre, the city leaned in. Broadway San Diego amplified the tour’s presence, and nearby spots, including the historic The US Grant, rolled out themed cocktails and pre-show specials, turning the Civic Theatre corridor into a kind of striped pilgrimage route. It felt less like a stop on a tour and more like an event.
Underneath the camp, the strobes, the sandworms and the meta asides, Beetlejuice remains unexpectedly wholesome. It is about grief. About invisibility. About what it means to be seen, even by the dead. That tension between morbidity and sincerity is what gives the show its strange buoyancy. Yes, it is a “show about death,” as the opening number gleefully proclaims. But on Sunday night in San Diego, it felt unmistakably alive.
And for a touring production to leave that impression - technically impeccable, vocally muscular, and emotionally resonant - is no small feat.
For more information about Beetlejuice The Musical, visit beetlejuicebroadway.com, and learn more about Broadway San Diego's upcoming shows at broadwaysd.com.
Originally published on March 1, 2026.
Originally published on March 1, 2026.
