'Beetlejuice' presented by FSCJ Artist Series Balances Anarchic Comedy With Surprising Heart

The first thing to know about Beetlejuice: The Musical. The Musical. The Musical. (yes, that’s is the actual subtitle) is that it knows exactly what it is. The second thing to know is that it has no interest in being a karaoke version of the 1988 Tim Burton film. The touring engagement presented by FSCJ Artist Series’ at the Moran Theater threads that needle with confidence: tons of fun, with moments of real emotion that catch you sideways when you are least prepared for them.

Eddie Perfect’s score swings hard between vaudeville-style irreverence and unguarded sincerity, and the touring company that landed in Jacksonville understands the assignment. This is not a show that rewards restraint, and the production has not asked for any. What it does ask for, and gets, is precision underneath the chaos.

Ryan Stajmiger, who plays the title ghoul, has the hardest job in the building. Stepping into a role indelibly associated with Alex Brightman’s iconic Tony-nominated Broadway turn is a tightrope: lean too hard into impression and the performance vanishes behind the reference; pull too far away and the demon becomes someone else’s bit entirely. Stajmiger finds a third option. The voice is gravelly and elastic, the mugging committed without being desperate, and crucially he is making choices, not copies. There is a lounge-singer slipperiness to his line readings that feels like his own invention. The audience clocked it. He earns the show’s biggest laughs without ever seeming to chase them.

If Beetlejuice is the show’s engine, Lydia Deetz is its compass, and Leianna Weaver points it true. The musical’s most significant departure from the film is that it centers Lydia’s grief — her mother’s death, the unbearable cheerfulness of everyone trying to repackage that loss — and makes her the audience’s heart. The role is a beast: she is onstage for most of the night and has to land “Dead Mom,” the score’s most emotionally exposed number, while also being funny, sharp-elbowed and credibly sixteen. Weaver plays Lydia as a huge ball of energy and dark spunk, but she also knows when to drop the armor. The stillness she finds in the second act is the moment the show stops winking and starts meaning something.

That tension — between the cartoon and the elegy — is the central trick of Beetlejuice as a piece of theatre. The musical is structurally almost nothing like the film. The plot has been rebuilt to give Lydia agency rather than make her a haunted house’s reluctant resident, and several of the film’s most quoted beats are either reframed, repurposed or skipped entirely. And yet the soul of the thing — the conviction that death is funny because it is terrifying, that grief and absurdity are roommates, that the right haunting can be a kind of love letter — survives intact. This production trusts that paradox and lets the audience trust it too.

The supporting company carries its weight. The Maitlands — David Wilson’s Adam and Kaitlin Feely’s Barbara — play doomed-suburbanite sweetness without making the joke at their expense. Bailey Frankenberg’s Delia earns her belt without flattening into pure caricature, and Jeff Brooks lands the show’s quieter beats as Charles, a father who has no idea how to grieve out loud in front of his daughter. Alessandra Casanova’s Miss Argentina is a second-act jolt of polish, and the ensemble — more than twenty strong, with Sterling Nelson Jones stepping in for ensemble duty at the performance reviewed — moves like a unit, particularly in the Act One closer, which builds to a kind of organized pandemonium that is harder to choreograph than it looks.

Adam Fields, a Jacksonville native born in Atlantic Beach and making his national tour debut as Otho, drew a real hometown ovation on his entrance — the kind of welcome-back the rest of the audience picks up on three beats late, then doubles down on. He earns it. Fields plays Otho as the show’s gleeful answer to an empty calorie: a self-styled designer-turned-spiritual-guru who has talked his way into Delia’s orbit, dispenses gnomic aphorisms with the smug authority of a man absolutely certain he is profound and gets quoted back in earnest by people who should know better. As Fields told First Coast News ahead of the engagement, his Otho is “very, very different from the movie” — less the obnoxious appraiser of the 1988 film and more “a borderline cult leader” whose quotes “make no sense, and he’s a fraud.” That mismatch between the importance Otho assigns himself and the obvious nothing behind the curtain is the joke, and Fields plays it without ever winking, which is precisely what makes it land. He is also covering four tracks on this tour, including the title role — a workload he detailed in a pre-engagement interview with BroadwayWorld — and it is the kind of quietly demanding under-the-hood work this evening leaves a hometown crowd newly aware of.

Technically, this is the touring marvel the marketing promises. The sandworm reveal still pulls a gasp, the house itself becomes a character through its transformations, and David Korins’ Broadway scenic design plays big and bold across the full size of the Moran Theater — visuals that hit just as hard from the upper balcony as they do from the front row.

Unfortunately, the orchestra is where the production sounds smaller than it looks. Charlie Yokom conducts from the keys alongside an assistant conductor on a second keyboard — one of the two handling synth — with guitar, bass and drums rounding out the live band. Perfect’s brass parts come in from a backing track. The canned horns never quite settle into the room with the live players, and the overall mix is muddy in places, so vocals that should land with bite occasionally arrive soft.

This is a touring-economics decision as much as an artistic one. Trimming the live pit and piping the missing parts in from a backing track is an increasingly common cost-saver on the road, but it is a saving the audience can hear, and a score this brass-forward is exactly the wrong place to make it. The result is production value left in the truck — and in a show this loud about being loud, the orchestration is the one place the evening audibly thins out.

The show’s edgier comedic register — proudly PG-13, occasionally a notch past — will not be for every family despite the Halloween-costume appeal. Bring older kids, not younger.

But none of that dulls the central pleasure of this Beetlejuice: that it is a big, loud, deliberately tacky stage musical that nevertheless takes its grief seriously. Burton’s film was about a ghost who wanted to be seen. The musical is about a girl who is invisible to the living people in her own house, and what it costs her to demand otherwise. FSCJ Artist Series has brought a touring production that honors both of those instincts — the prankster and the mourner — and lets them share the stage without flinching.

It is a good night out. It is also, in spots you do not see coming, a good cry.

Beetlejuice runs Tuesday, May 12 through Sunday, May 17 at the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts's Moran Theater.

For more information, full cast and crew credits and links to tickets, visit the Beetlejuice page here on JaxPlays.