The national tour of “Beetlejuice” the musical will come to the IU Auditorium for four performances April 10-12.
An hour before each performance, folklore and ethnomusicology PhD student Gwynedd R. Harris will lead a pre-show talk discussing how the movie and musical explore how children play with fear through rhymes and chants, like the cursed repetition of Beetlejuice’s name in the story.
“I know certainly from my own experience watching the movie, that’s something that I loved about it, is that it allows for me to enjoy kind of, like, creepier or kind of dark themes like death, dying, the afterlife, without it being too heavy or too scary,” Harris said. “And so I think that, to return to my whole theme of balancing play with fear, allows us to explore those concepts in a way that is comfortable and, maybe most importantly, fun.”
“Beetlejuice” is the musical adaptation of the 1988 movie of the same name. The eccentric story follows Lydia Deetz, a depressed teen, after her family moves into a home haunted by a dead couple. Once they discover the family’s plan to change the house, the couple tries to scare them away, but instead attract the devious ghost Beetlejuice, who wreaks havoc on everyone.
The musical brought to life the lively imagery and characters from the movie while shifting the story slightly to have a greater focus on the theme of family.
Ansley Valentine, an associate professor of acting and directing in the Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance at IU, said the process of adapting movies into musicals has changed quite a bit over the years.
Valentine said when movies were first being adapted into musicals, creatives would simply take the script from the movie and put it on stage without changing much from it. However, the timing and rhythm of movies are very different from musicals, so those shows weren’t very successful.
Now, writers use the intellectual property from the movie and reimagine it, as was done with “Beetlejuice.” So, the characters will often be the same as the movie, but the plot itself will vary to help accommodate the stage setting.
“If you’ve seen the movie, you certainly will recognize what happens in the musical, but it is not, you know, like a line for line, moment for moment adaptation,” Valentine said. “They really just took the character, you know, the main characters of Lydia and Beetlejuice and the parents and whatnot and the major story points and then, you know, reconfigured it, reimagined it.”
Valentine said this reimagining of the storyline often involves condensing certain scenes and extending moments that didn’t get much time in the movie. This is a big part of the addition of music in “Beetlejuice” the musical. He said moments of tension or emotion typically get turned into musical numbers first.
After transforming these moments into songs, Valentine said creatives then question what fun moments would work well as a musical number, like the dinner party scene in “Beetlejuice,” which became the biggest and most elaborate musical number in the show.
However, the version of the musical coming to Bloomington has had its own transformation from the Broadway stage. Mimi Intagliata, an IU alumna, is the executive producer of the “Beetlejuice” national tour and was tasked with downsizing the production to make it tour able.
Intagliata said she graduated from IU in 1988 as an acting student. After discovering she hated the auditioning process during her time at college, she became involved with stage management. She pursued it after graduating and is now an executive producer at NETwork Tours, a company that does national tours of musicals and plays.
As the executive producer of the “Beetlejuice” tour, Intagliata said she oversees everything from the road team traveling with the show to the management, marketing and sales for the show.
She said she starts working with shows as soon as NETwork gets the rights to tour the show. This is typically after a show’s first national tour, which is the first tour the show goes on after Broadway, usually visiting larger cities for long periods of time. NETwork is in charge of the second national tours which consist of smaller cities, venues and shorter periods of time at each stop. So, she said a big part of her job is downsizing the show to be cost effective and able to tour easily.
When downsizing a show, Intagliata said she and her team look for what aspects of the show are crucial to the storytelling, so they ensure that those most important parts are preserved.
“I think as a company we do a really good job adapting the shows from the original, large first nationals to the smaller second nationals,” Intagliata said. “I think in the case of ‘Beetlejuice,’ it’s been really successful.”
Intagliata said the show didn’t change much from the first national tour and keeps the same level of heart and wonder from the original production. She said audiences can expect to have a fun and heartfelt time with the show.
“The movie is really… I mean, it’s a classic,” Intagliata said. “I think what was really surprising in a great way to me when I saw the musical is how much heart it has. It really has a sense of, you know, family and finding your family and I think it’s a heck of a lot of fun.”
Tickets are available at the IU Auditorium box office and website, starting at $34 for the general public and $26 for IU students.
