What a happy coincidence: two musicals have opened in Melbourne within a week of each other that both take you to hell and back. Hadestown deals with an ancient Greek concept of the underworld, allegorical but rich with meaning. Beetlejuice has a netherworld straight out of the imagination of Tim Burton, cartoonish and strictly adolescent. Neither of them would pass muster with a fire and brimstone evangelist – who’d surely require more wailing and gnashing – but they work well enough as places of wonder and enchantment in a modern musical.
In adapting Burton’s keenly idiosyncratic 1988 film to the stage, composer and lyricist Eddie Perfect and book writers Scott Brown and Anthony King know just what to ditch and what to keep precisely the same. So we get the swirling vortices and striped suits, the sandworm and desiccated head, the dead gridiron players and the woman who smokes out of her trachea. We also get the two calypso songs from Harry Belafonte, the Banana Boat Song (Day-O) and Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora). If the path the story takes is simpler, it hits all the right beats and gets us roughly to the same destination.
