Beetlejuice (musical)
2018 musical based off the 1988 film

Beetlejuice The Musical. The Musical. The Musical., or simply Beetlejuice, is a musical with music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect and book by Scott Brown and Anthony King. It is based on the 1988 film of the same name. The story concerns a deceased couple who try to haunt the new inhabitants of their former home and call for help from a devious bio-exorcist ghost named after the star Betelgeuse (which is pronounced, and often spelled, "Beetlejuice"), who is summoned by saying his name three times. One of the new inhabitants is a young girl, Lydia, who is dealing with her mother's death and her neglectful father.
The musical had a tryout at the National Theatre, Washington, D.C., in October 2018, prior to opening on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 25, 2019. It is produced by Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures (a unit of franchise owner Warner Bros.). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the show played its final performance at the Winter Garden on March 10, 2020.
The public source identifies “Beetlejuice (musical)” as 2018 musical based off the 1988 film. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Beetlejuice, musical and based.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55639292. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beetlejuice (musical)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.