If you're only going to see one musical this season, let it be Beetlejuice
Everyone from a Pollyanna-ish girl scout (Rebecca Ordiz) to a dead beauty queen (Angelique Cassimatis) – not to mention Beetlejuice's own chain-smoking mother (Noni McCallum) – gets in on the action as the door to a bureaucratic underworld opens, and Lydia must find a way to cope with her loss before all hell breaks loose.
Everything about Beetlejuice is super-slick and timed to perfection. The musical is so jam-packed with visual gags and satirical lyrics and outre musical hijinks you'd probably need to see the show twice to catch them all.
Perfect is in his element as an equally appealing and offensive agent of chaos, poking fun at every musical theatre rule with scruffy charisma, riding a hometown vibe with some of the ad-libbed jokes.
Opposite him, Karis Oka is ideally cast as Lydia, playing the show's beating black heart with a winsome but slightly vicious undertone that might just bring about a goth revival and certainly won't disappoint fans of Winona Ryder in the original movie.
McCann and Johnson leap into parody as a couple diminished by suburban life – channelling shades of Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror, only, well, dead. And camp comedy is embraced with wild abandon by the supporting cast.
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Dinner party guests are possessed into performing Harry Belafonte songs; Claire's ditzy Delia butts heads with the goth heroine in a duet that pits mindless positivity against nihilistic angst; and an entire chorus of Beetlejuices conquers the stage with gruesome … glamour is not the word.
Pigs' genitals might have been removed from the show, but Beetlejuice still revels in rebelling against the appropriate and its highly orchestrated chaos does, in the end, achieve comic catharsis.
We are all strange and unusual, after all, and never more so than when we refuse to admit how fleeting life is, or to embrace life knowing we're all going to die.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Theremin and Beyond ★★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, May 17
German theremin virtuoso Carolina Eyck is a musical conjurer. Making mysterious hand gestures between the two antennas of her electronic instrument, she seemingly creates music out of thin air. Named after its Russian inventor, the theremin led the way in electronica.
Because of its eerie sounds, the theremin has been a godsend for movie and television composers. Surely, Midsomer's reputation as the most murderous place in England could not have been cemented without its spooky theremin theme, nor would Hitchcock's Spellbound be so compelling without composer Miklos Rozsa's appropriation of the instrument.
In this eclectic program, the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrated the theremin's place in popular culture, creating a party atmosphere with The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations, Morricone's music for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and an arrangement of the Star Trek theme.
Classical repertory was not neglected with empathetic accounts of Bach's so-called Air on a G String, extracts from Saint-Saens' The Carnival of the Animals including its celebrated swan, and at the other end of the spectrum, a clever take on Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. Glinka's The Lark also appeared – the song with which Theremin introduced his invention to Lenin.
Holly Harrison's Hovercraft, commissioned by the ACO for Eyck, brilliantly opened up the expressive capabilities of the theremin as did Eyck's own composition Strange Birds.
Reduced to some 10 players, the ACO strings led by Richard Tognetti provided diverse connective tissue with works by Brett Dean, Erwin Schulhoff and Shostakovich's Japanese friend Yasushi Akutagawa.
Enlivened by the colourful addition of pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska and percussionist Brian Nixon for much of the program, rhythmic interest also came with Offenbach's famous Can-can and Jorg Widmann's 180 Beats per Minute.
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