It is rare to be given a chance to sit down with the writer of a Broadway musical. But this is exactly what happened in Brisbane last week with Eddie Perfect, composer and lyricist of the Tony-nominated Beetlejuice The Musical.
The Scoop joined key media, invited guests and local musical theatre students at a special event, hosted by Michael Cassel, producer of the Australian tour, ahead of the 2026 return season.
Beetlejuice kicks off in Brisbane from 7 June, before embarking on a national tour following its highly successful Melbourne premiere season in 2025. The musical will then head to all the major Australian cities, including Perth, Adelaide and Sydney.
In this extended chat, Eddie Perfect offered insights into his creative process writing the musical, his experience playing the title role for the Melbourne premiere season, how worldwide audiences have responded to the show and what it was like bringing the show home to Australia.
Below is the interview, edited for clarity.
Michael Cassel: We were lucky enough to have you originate the role of Beetlejuice in Melbourne, and now you’re passing the baton to Andy Karl. What was it like performing in your own show in Melbourne?
Eddie Perfect: I knew some of the lyrics a bit better than maybe someone else, but apart from that, there was no advantage. It was like working as a waiter, and then all of a sudden you have to cook the meals. As a writer, you can become quite complacent about making a whole bunch of difficult things an actor’s problem. Having to do them as an actor is great karma.
Alex Brightman originated the role of Beetlejuice on Broadway. We were very spoiled, because he can do anything. You throw anything at him, any comedy, any beat, shove him in any position. He’s a small guy; he fits in different places, and he was hidden all over the stage.
And when I did it, I had to message him and go, I am so sorry. It’s a really frenetic role, especially the first 25 minutes of the show. It’s all Beetlejuice. It’s part stand-up, it’s also vaudeville, and you’re driving all of these scenes. It was like a physical fitness thing, really, to get through those first 25 minutes. It was a wild experience.
Michael Cassel: Did Alex give you any tips?
Eddie Perfect: No. He just said, “Good luck.” I mean, you kind of have to make it your own, which is tricky, especially when someone as brilliant as Alex Brightman begins things. But there are no guardrails with a role like Beetlejuice.
In fact, there were no guardrails writing the show either, because it’s a fantastical world with ghosts, demons, living people, dead people and netherworlds and real worlds intercolliding, so it’s just got to be surprising.
And what was really fun about that from an acting perspective is that you get to rehearsals, and it’s got to come from you. It’s got to be all of your comedic ideas. And you’ve got to go, what kind of Beetlejuice am I? Turns out I’m very needy.
And that’s what makes Beetlejuice an enduring character. He wants to be real and living in the world. He wants to experience the full range of human emotions. And when he finally gets to do that, he can’t really handle it. It’s a hard thing being alive.
Michael Cassel: So take us back to the very beginning. How did Beetlejuice come into your life?
Eddie Perfect: Well, this is the expurgated version. There’s no clear path to Broadway, but I had complained about the lack of opportunities to write a whole score here in Australia. And instead of doing anything about it, I just moped around the house and bitched to my wife. She got sick of it and was like, buy a ticket, go to New York, and start having meetings.
There’s a superpower in life, if you haven’t worked it out already, where you keep reorganising things. But a lot of stuff happens when you just turn up. And New York is very much a turn-up kind of city. People don’t really know how to deal with a theoretical you, but they do once you’re physically there.
I’m not a pushy person or a hustle-y person. But I am very passionate about writing for musicals, and I very much wanted to work in the great big sandpit of Broadway. So I would just sort of turn up and take meetings with whoever.
I found an agent who believed in me, even though the only material I gave him was Shane Warne: The Musical. And the other was a song cycle about Mentone, the Melbourne suburb I grew up in. Two niche things, but he somehow liked the writing.
I had heard that Beetlejuice The Musical was in development with Warner Brothers Theatricals, and that there were two script writers, Anthony King and Scott Brown, whom I had known because they wrote Gutenberg the Musical. And they had been working on adapting the book.
I knew that Alex Timbers was directing it, and I had just seen two of his shows on Broadway. I knew that his sensibility was so extraordinary. I was very hungry to do something, so I asked my agent if I could pitch on this musical. So he asked the creative team, and they said no.
They were about to pitch a whole bunch of very high-profile composer-lyricist teams. They didn’t want to expand the pitch anymore, because they didn’t want to pay another person to contribute demos as part of the pitch process.
So I was like, well, if that’s the problem, I’ll just write two songs for free. And my agent was kind of surprised that I would do that. You don’t want to know what I would do. I thought the best thing I could do was get my writing under the nose of a proper Broadway director. I won’t get the gig, but at least there might be something else that I’m right for.
I also thought the best thing I could do was prove to my New York agent that I could write to an American brief. And so I entered into the process, really swinging for the fences. I’ve gotten where I’ve gotten because of the risks that I’ve taken. And when the stakes are really high, there’s a tendency to become risk-averse. But I thought, I’ve got to keep going the way that I’ve started.
One of the first songs I wrote was The Whole Being Dead Thing, which cycles through about 20 different genres of music. Because on the page, Beetlejuice is such a wild character, so varied and funny and surprising. If I just stick to one genre, it’s going to rob him of all the surprising comedy he has in his dialogue.
So I just stitched together this kind of Frankenstein’s monster of different genres. It took a really long time, and when I finished, I was like, I don’t know what they’re going to make of this. There’s not a lot of this sort of stuff on Broadway.
At the same time, I wrote a song for Lydia called Dead Mom, which is more the same genre all the way through. It’s a ‘90s sort of powerful punk rock, Green Day, Nirvana-esque type song that I thought an angry girl with a Fender guitar in her bed could crank out and sing.
I wrote those two songs, and I got an idea for a bonus opening number that never made it into the show, a song called Death’s Not Great. And I just sent all three to the producers, whom I’d never met and who didn’t really want me to pitch and thought I was a weird Australian with a weird name, and I didn’t hear anything.
Three months later, my agent called me and said, You booked the gig. And what followed was five years of really intense writing and getting to see how a Broadway show is made from the inside, all the good, the bad, the ugly, the huge pressure, the stress. But it is a magical experience.
Michael Cassel: I was fortunate enough to see your show on opening night on Broadway. And like many people who may be familiar with the film but have yet to see the musical, you have an expectation of what Beetlejuice is. What struck me was that despite all of the hilarity and the comedy, it actually deals with quite deep emotional themes of loss and grief.
How did you approach that in bringing those two worlds together and striking that balance of being a great piece of entertainment, but also having great heart and connection that ultimately engages with an audience?
Eddie Perfect: I was lucky on a couple of levels in my writing, in that my wife, Lucy Cochran, is a really great sounding board for all of my work. She’s super smart, so I’m always bouncing ideas off her. And because she has a background in advertising and marketing, and now, as a clinical psychologist, she understands behaviour and how people think.
But also, my wife went through the loss of her mother at the age of eight. Her mother died in a car accident, and so I was…fortunate is a weird word to use, but I really wanted to honour the real experience that my wife had, losing her mother, and how it’s something that isn’t a wound from which you just simply recover from, and then it goes in the rear view mirror.
Grief is one of those things that pops up every time there’s a new experience that you wanted to share with that person. As you grow up and you change, and you have kids, the loss of a mother never leaves you. Be it as an 80-year-old, 90-year-old human being walking around and still very much missing your mother, father or whoever we lost.
Grief isn’t really sexy, and it isn’t really funny, and we don’t really like to talk about it. And so we didn’t want to make this super depressing show. We wanted it to be life-affirming, but we also wanted it to be honest.
So there were some times in early workshops where things happened in the netherworld. In one of the first drafts, Lydia actually did reunite with her mother. And I remember after that workshop showing, myself, Scott and Anthony were sitting in a bar afterwards, and we were like, that didn’t feel right. And the reason is because you never get to do that. That’s what grief is. It’s the unanswered questions. It’s the continual loss, it’s the lack of closure.
We thought, we are selling people’s experience of grief down the river if we don’t present the netherworld as this never-ending, unchanging, unfeeling void of nothingness where you don’t get the answers you’re looking for.
And so the decision for Lydia to go back and live in the real world, to make a home with the people that she has in her life, even if they are imperfect, is a decision she makes for herself. She decides to live messily in a way that her mother would have wanted.
So it becomes a celebration of life. And then we just make sure that Beetlejuice gives everybody right up front, permission to laugh at the scary and the sad thing, and audiences really take us up on that.
One of my favourite reactions is the creativity that comes out of people. We opened on Broadway, at the Winter Garden Theatre, which is a very large theatre, and we very quickly filled all the walls with extraordinary fan art. And then a similar thing happened in Australia. There’s just something about the world of Beetlejuice. The creativity of the visual style just empowers people to want to write and make stuff.
Michael Cassel: When was that moment in time when you thought, Wow, we’ve got something special that I think is going to have a life beyond Broadway?
Eddie Perfect: You never really know. One of my favourite TV shows is Survivor. It’s a microcosm of human collaboration, and you never know what’s around the corner. You have to stay optimistic, even when things are falling apart.
But making a show is so weird because you’d think that after you’ve been making shows for a really long time, the process would get shorter because you know what you’re doing. But as you make a show, you’re learning what the show is. And sometimes it’s not until you see it, and you’re sitting in an audience watching it through their fresh eyes, that you start to understand what it is you’ve made.
When we opened in Washington, DC, we knew we had something vibrant and funny and surprising and maybe different to what was out there. But we didn’t really know what people were picking up on and what messages they were taking away with them.
And as we went to rewrite the show, this concept of home emerged that wasn’t there for the DC show. This concept that, when we lose somebody really close to us, we lose our sense of belonging and our sense of home. They’re the people who make us feel safe. Can we go on without that sense of belonging? Can we recreate that sense of home? What is home?
That theme kind of emerged in the rewriting of it. We’d been working on this show for five years. Sometimes it feels like you’re in a video game. You’re on a level in a video game, and you’re like, I want to be on the next level, but you haven’t done one task. Making a show is similar to that.
Sometimes the key idea for what the show is about doesn’t emerge until you’ve sat with the piece for years, and all of a sudden it turns up, and you’re like, Why didn’t I think of that on day one? Why didn’t I see that home was a central theme to the show?
The Banana Boat Song literally says: Daylight come and I want to go home. That hadn’t occurred to me until five years in. And in DC, there was a final moment where Lydia sang Shake Senora, and she has this new family around her made up of real people and ghosts, and the song ended, and it was nice, but it didn’t really land with a punch.
And because it was Shake Senora, one of two songs that I didn’t write, I thought, I can’t really touch that. I didn’t know if I was allowed, but in the end I wrote a new section. I wrote a reprise of Dead Mom and put it in there. It also had the theme of “mama, I’m home,” and it just felt like everything came together. That was a really cool moment.
Michael Cassel: One of my favourite moments musically is towards the end of the second act, where all those themes come together. When you arrived at that point, did you make any changes to the songs you’d previously written to bring all that together?
Eddie Perfect: Yeah, we were making changes all the time. One of the things that I got better at while I was working on Broadway was learning how to cut material. A lot of the time, our producers would come to us and say, twenty minutes out of Act One. And they don’t tell you which twenty minutes.
So normally that means you’ve got to lose a scene and lose a song. And we would do this thing where everyone in every department would bring out their dead. We would just offer up cuts. With comedy, you want to be out of Act One in under 70 minutes. And in Act Two, if you can get that right on one hour, it’s really good. It’s pacy. People aren’t looking at their watches.
I learned about not just cutting songs, but also internal cuts in songs. You can have a whole first verse and first chorus, but if you’re coming back to a second verse, you always want to be ahead of the audience. Those new words better be taking the story somewhere else, or an audience is like, okay, we’re ahead of you now, and you can feel it.
I would stand in the back of the Winter Garden Theatre and watch the backs of everyone’s heads. And you’d just see, okay, they’re disengaged, or they’re leaning forward, they’re laughing. They want the person next to them to know that that was a noteworthy moment. You could read people. I learned a lot about timing and pacing, especially with Alex Timbers.
Michael Cassel: What’s your favourite song from the show?
Eddie Perfect: I think my favourite song is Dead Mom. It was the first song I wrote. It’s the most true to my wife’s experience of grief and losing her mum. And because it was the song that got me the job. But I tell you what, if you write a good song for a project, well, it changed my world.
I wrote that song in this little shed at the back of my house in Brunswick in Melbourne, and it got me and my family all the way to New York. Young people sing it. It’s in people’s audition books all over the place. People are singing it everywhere. It’s annoying to some people. It’s one of those songs, and that’s exciting.
Because with writing, you’re not quite sure whether anyone’s ever going to notice anything that you do. And all of a sudden, you write this song. And it’s been out there for a while now. It’s been covered by so many people that when I hear a version of it, I actually don’t feel any ownership of that song. It’s really weird.
Michael Cassel: Can you talk about the release of the demos, which I think was a testament to your writing and the connection that audiences had with your music?
Eddie Perfect: I love making demos. As an Australian, I felt like I had to do everything, I had to make fully produced demos. For me, it was almost like saying, this is a simulation of what it might sound like on stage when there’s a Broadway band.
Obviously, you end up working with orchestrators, and the orchestration changes. But working in Australia, you don’t necessarily have the comfort of being able to hand over a piano vocal demo and know that the person on the other end can hear the orchestra or the intention for it. And so I put a lot of time into my demos.
The part I love most about art is that shit conversation you have with yourself. There’s a bit in Say My Name where Beetlejuice and Lydia play charades. And I would actually write one side of it, and then I would improvise the other side of it. Then I would remove that other side of it, and I would re-compose it. A lot of it, as a performer, is being written through performance and through improvisation. I just went crazy writing; I think we cut like 20 original songs.
When we were in the pandemic, and the show had evaporated, and all theatre had evaporated, and my life had sort of evaporated, there was this whole fandom, and Beetlejuice was sitting there with nothing to do. And I was like, I’m just going to put out the demos.
I thought, maybe it’ll be interesting to fans, and also for people who write musicals. Maybe they can see that these things don’t arrive fully formed, and that it’s just a process of experimentation and courage to just throw out ridiculous ideas.
Michael Cassel: What’s been your highlight opening the show all around the world? You’ve been able to get the show up on Broadway, the US tour, you’ve been in Japan, you’re about to open in the West End. What changes do you notice as these shows are reincarnated in each new market?
Eddie Perfect: Well, comedy is one of those things where you have to tailor this jacket to yourself. You can put on someone else’s jacket, but you do have to make your own. Otherwise, it just never feels right. So it’s very exciting to see the show work with different actors and very different takes.
But for me, the highlight of the whole thing, once the show was up on Broadway, before the pandemic, and when I was living on the Upper West Side, sometimes I would just be like, what do you reckon they’d be up to in Act Two? I reckon they’re probably getting to the netherworld.
And if I were passing by, I would just go into the theatre. Because I’m the composer, I know the door people, I’d just go in Stage Door. I would hide behind a little curtain, and then when the applause happened, I would sneak into the Winter Garden Theatre.
It was extraordinary to me when the show was really cranking before COVID. There was just this wild energy, and I was completely anonymous, which I really enjoyed. I’d walk up and watch it at the back. I stayed for a couple of songs, and then I’d go off. I just love that it was making people happy, that it was getting such a huge reaction, and that I was free to go and write the next thing. It just happened without me.
And that happens in other theatres and other places in the world. Beetlejuice is happening all over the world in replica productions and non-replica productions in all different languages. It’s been in Swedish and Czech.
There’s this very dark version in Poland. You get sent the translations, and you get a very good sense of a country’s sense of life and death very quickly. In the Polish one, everything is meaningless and bleak and grey, and life is just a teardrop on a stained window pane.
Michael Cassel: One of the most unique experiences of producing the show here was being able to go through the audition process, where we were fortunate enough to have the composer and lyricist sitting in the audition room with us. What was that like for you, seeing a lot of your peers and colleagues come and be a part of the audition process for your show?
Eddie Perfect: I found that really hard, actually. Being someone who’s on both sides of things, I understand how nerve-racking it is. I didn’t know how an auditionee might feel coming in for the musical, and the guy who wrote it is there. They didn’t know that I’m not precious. So I didn’t know whether I was helping or hurting.
But being in there, it was really interesting to see the auditions and be reminded of the depth of talent that’s in Australia. I mean, we are really lucky. I know I’m biased because I’m Australian. But I think the Australian cast of Beetlejuice is the best cast that there’s been.
It’s an ensemble show, and it requires the ensemble to be extraordinary dancers, highly acrobatic and skilled in their dancing. But they also sing full out while they’re dancing full out. They have to be really funny. And what I love about the Australian ensemble is that every single individual is an interesting and exciting performer.
Andy Karl is an absolutely brilliant powerhouse. Karis Oka is easily one of the best Lydia’s we’ve ever had. She’s just mind-blowing with what she can do vocally, but with her acting as well. Elise McCann, Rob Johnson, Tom Wren, Erin Clare, who plays Delia, who is so funny, so surprisingly funny. So yeah, we’re really blessed.
It’s a scary thing putting together a cast for a musical. The last time I sat on an audition panel was for my first musical, Shane Warne: The Musical, and no one wanted to be in it. Every day, twenty people would pull out of the audition spots.
We struggled to find a cast. I was very new, and the idea of a musical about cricket was not massively appealing to anyone. And so people came in because things had gone badly at Jersey Boys or Wicked.
And then to do Beetlejuice, where people wanted to be in the show, they were really excited to be in the show. I was like, yeah, that’s changed. So it was an interesting turnaround.
Michael Cassel: Brisbane kicks off the next leg of the Australian tour. We get to make home here for a little while, re-rehearse the company and launch in June. What can Brisbane audiences look forward to when the show arrives here at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC?
Eddie Perfect: I think Brisbane is going to really love this show. I’ve done quite a few musicals in Brisbane now. It has an accurate reputation Australia-wide as one of the greatest places for musicals, because people turn up. I know it’s going to be special.
I’m looking forward to the alchemy of how Beetlejuice takes over the city. I met a lot of Brisbane people who came down to Melbourne to see the show. Families would come with little kids, and the weird things people would wear. You’d look in the audience, and there’d be a nine-year-old Beetlejuice, and in the dark, it just looks terrifying.
It really does bring out the weirdness in people. It’s a great excuse to have a night of celebrating life and craziness and love and just cherishing the people around you. For a show that was pretty rough around the edges when we began in Washington, DC, it’s turned into this family show, which is really nice.
Beetlejuice The Musical runs at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC in Brisbane from 7 June 2026.
It then runs in Perth from 16 August, Adelaide from 10 October and Sydney from 21 November. Tickets are available at the website.
Tickets: https://beetlejuicethemusical.com.au/tickets/brisbane/
Website: https://beetlejuicethemusical.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/beetlejuiceaus/
Hero image photo credit: B’rit Mobbs
