Beetlejuice Closing and Why It Shouldn’t
It’s no secret that Beetlejuice is one of my all time favorite musicals.
It was announced earlier this evening that it will be leaving Broadway in June, just one day before the 2020 Tony Awards.
Why?
Money. Except, that no longer makes sense. According to Michael Paulson of the New York Times, Beetlejuice is not only a strong show, but getting stronger and even selling out. According to Paulson, the company that owns the Winter Garden Theatre (Shubert Organization) has a deal that all of its tenants have to hit a certain box office mark in order to keep their place on Broadway. If a show misses that mark two weeks in a row, Shubert has the right to evict them. Beetlejuice missed the mark in May, back when it first opened. The cast was told back in October that they will have to leave. However, since then, Beetlejuice has not only broken its own records, but the records for box office numbers set by the Winter Garden since the theater opened in 1911. Beetlejuice is also helping bring musicals back into the mainstream. I have a great number of friends who have said to me, “I don’t generally like musicals, but I gotta say: I really like the Beetlejuice music.” It’s also one of the musicals that really got famous through TikTok, using a new form of social media, introducing a whole new generation of kids to Broadway. Beetlejuice is a show that would technically be classified as “show tunes,” but I would qualify as more pop with context.
Despite this, The Music Man with Hugh Jackman is supposed to be taking Beetlejuice’s spot at the Winter Garden. A 2020 version of The Music Man makes the Broadway checklist, as it hits the two main things that your typical theater goer would want: familiar content and a star. In a class I took called “How The Entertainment Industry Works,” we covered who the main target audience is for Broadway, aka the “typical theater goer,” and why. Essentially, since it comes down to the bottom line: Broadway wants rich, old, white people. That’s exactly the kind of person that TMM is going to attract. This upsets me a lot, for many reasons, but I’m just going to address the two main ones. Firstly, it literally doesn’t even make sense to force Beetlejuice out. They’re raking in cash for the Shubert Organization. Of course the Music Man is going to do well, but not for that long. Once the headliners leave, people will stop buying tickets. When people see Beetlejuice, it’s not the kind of show that you can see once and be satisfied. It’s the kind of show that makes you feel like you have to listen to the music on a loop and see at least one more time. I’m speaking from personal experience and everyone I know personally that has seen it.
Most importantly, The Music Man is not original. Yes, Beetlejuice is based off of a movie from the 1980s, but I had never even heard of the movie until I saw the musical. Most people my age, unless they grew up being really into Halloween type things, are in the same boat. People who see Beetlejuice (for the most part) aren’t going because of familiarity with the story. Also, while it’s technically the same plot as the movie, the musical changes the main themes and Beetlejuice as a character. By doing this, they completely change the story, making it their own.
Other Broadway theaters, on the other hand, keeps resurrecting these old shows (West Side Story, Carousel, Hello Dolly, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, just to name a handful from the last three years) that we’re supposed to be happy about because they’re “classics.” In addition to TMM, the Shubert Organization is reviving Company in 2020. To be clear, I do appreciate these shows because it’s what musical theater as we know it today is rooted in. Under different circumstances, I’d be excited about seeing a modern adaption to an old show. But let’s save that for when Broadway is completely out of new ideas. We have a fantastic idea already in place, there’s no need to replace it with something we’ve already seen countless times. The Music Man can come to Broadway, but they should go to a theater where nothing is planned for that time slot, like the Lyceum, even though it’s smaller. Music Man can move into the Winter Garden when and IF Beetlejuice starts to go under, instead of leaving Beetlejuice with nowhere to go because their set pieces are larger than life. The Music Man has options, we should too. We’re a new generation. We want new stories. We want Beetlejuice.
