The 'Beetlejuice' cast are having the time of their (after) life

It’s showtime for Aimie Atkinson, David Fynn, and Chelsea Halfpenny as they embark on a journey into the Netherworld in the West End premiere of Beetlejuice.

Summary

• Beetlejuice has transferred from Broadway to the West End
• Aimie Atkinson; David Fynn and Chelsea Halfpenny star in the cast
• The show is in performances at the Prince Edward Theatre

The supernatural has always been a source of fascination for West End star Aimie Atkinson. In her early 20s, she was part of a paranormal investigations group, which would search for haunted inns and castles in the hopes of uncovering the occult. “It was wild,” she says, laughing. “Now that I'm older, I feel like you can’t mess around with that stuff.”

While her real-life ghost-hunting days may be behind her, Atkinson, whose credits include Pretty Woman: The Musical and the original West End cast of SIX, is very much embracing the supernatural on stage as eccentric life coach Delia in the long-awaited London premiere of Beetlejuice, which is in performances at the Prince Edward Theatre.

The musical is based on Tim Burton’s gleefully macabre 1988 film, known for its giant claymation sandworm, launching the career of a young Winona Ryder, and putting Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” back in the spotlight. The movie starred Michael Keaton as the ghost with the most Beetlejuice, who creates trouble when helping a pair of recently deceased newlyweds to scare off new family the Deetzes (including unhappy teenager, Lydia) from their home. Scott Brown, Anthony King (book), and Eddie Perfect’s (music and lyrics) stage adaptation, directed by Alex Timbers, premiered on Broadway in 2019, and has since built a cult following in the vein of Heathers and SIX. Now the original Broadway creative team is resurrecting this wonderfully strange yet heartfelt musical in the West End.

David Fynn, the show’s new Beetlejuice, has been a fan of the gothic comedy horror since childhood, when he would watch the Burton film without his parents knowing. “The wackiness, and the colour, and the joy in it were clear to me, but the darker undertones probably not so much. It was one of the 10 films I watched on rotation as a kid,” he says.

Fynn believes that the musical chimes so much with younger audiences because it recognises the challenges faced by teenagers, which have only been exacerbated by social media. “Being a teenager now must be a nightmare. We all felt dorky or lonely, but you see this aspirational stuff online and it must be impossible for a brain that’s in its formative years.” Beetlejuice, meanwhile, shows that it’s “okay to embrace your freaky side”.

Atkinson agrees: “It is this world of misfits all coming together. It’s dysfunctional, but it’s great.”

She thinks that her character Delia’s journey is about “wanting to belong somewhere”, as she tries to find her place in the Deetz family and manage their grief through her extreme positive thinking. Atkinson won’t be pressed on whether Delia or Vivian (who she played in Pretty Woman) has better costumes — “I couldn’t possibly say!” — but reveals we can expect “lots of sleeves, crystals and jewellery” for her kooky life coach. Audiences are also in for a treat with “The Banana Boat Song”. “On the call sheet today [in rehearsals], it just said ‘Aimie, pig’,” she says laughing, referring to the puppet pig that comes to life after it is possessed by Beetlejuice. “I spent an hour of the day beating up a pig — that’s where we’re at in rehearsals at the moment!”

When the show first went to Broadway, Atkinson remembers receiving messages from friends telling her she was perfect for the role of the “whimsical” and “spiritual” Delia — seven years later, she’s finally able to prove them right.

The show has also been on Chelsea Halfpenny’s radar since its first Broadway run. She joins the production as Barbara Maitland — one half of the newlydead couple trying to scare away Lydia and her family — and has been obsessed with the score since she saw the musical on a whim in 2020. Although her expectations had been high, the Broadway show “was 10 times funnier than I imagined” and “every single song was such a bop.” Halfpenny believes that the bond that develops between Lydia and Barbara shows the power of ‘found family’, explaining that “nowadays, we’re so much more open to the fact that a family doesn’t just mean biological children. It can be whatever you want it to mean.”

There are also important learnings in the musical for Barbara and Adam Maitland, who is played by David Hunter, reuniting with Halfpenny following the Waitress tour. “I guess the theme of Adam and Barbara is that they don’t really get to live until they’ve died,” she says.

Halfpenny adds that she loves doing something which feels “very far away from my world”. Alongside Waitress, she has also starred in 9 to 5: The Musical, and was a series regular in both Casualty and Emmerdale, but the zany Beetlejuice feels like a fresh challenge. Halfpenny admits she was such a fan of the Broadway cast recording that she’s had to unlearn some of the songs during the rehearsal process, because there are differences in the sheet music for the West End production.

Fynn agrees that the musical is crammed with “epic” songs, and refers to Perfect’s 2020 album Beetlejuice: The Demos! The Demos! The Demos!, which includes early recordings, cut songs, and alternate versions that never made it into the production. “I was like, ‘you put these in any musical, and people would walk away humming’,” he says.

As for the songs that did make the cut, Fynn says the style of the music is fluid and adapts to the characters. He likens Lydia’s angsty songs to “90s Green Day punk”, while other numbers sound like a training montage from an 80s film or a Gene Kelly dance break.

He joins a pipeline of School of Rock to Beetlejuice performers, including Alex Brightman, who originated the title role on Broadway, and Justin Collette, who starred in the US national tour. All three have previously played failed rock star Dewey Finn. Why does Fynn think this trend has developed? “The character similarity is that it’s like a firework going off on stage [...] they’re a leader in terms of the pace and energy of the show.”

He continues: “Dewey Finn is also a beast of a role. There’s maybe something reassuring to the people making Beetlejuice that if we can handle that, we should be able to handle this.”

The demands of recreating Beetlejuice’s famous gravelly voice can be exhausting for performers, and Brightman was famously skilled in the Broadway production for using a special vocal technique called ventricular fold phonation, in which he would vibrate his false (rather than his true) vocal cords. Fynn says that he has visited an ears, nose and throat doctor to make sure his voice is ready for the challenge ahead, and will be using the gravelly tone sparingly as well as limiting post-show trips to the pub to ensure he remains in peak physical condition.

The crossovers between Fynn and Brightman don’t stop there. The pair had been saying for years that they should work together, recognising their shared trajectory with School of Rock. The opportunity came in 2024 when they played the Dromio twins in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC. “There were people who saw the show who thought it was one actor doing both parts,” Fynn says, “until a moment in Act Two when we’re on stage together at the same time!”

So, now that he’s succeeding Brightman in Beetlejuice, how does he interpret this mischievous demon from the Netherworld? “If you’re playing the craziest, most deviant person in the world, you still have to find something that people can hold on to. He’s been trapped for centuries, so you can see how he’s got here.”

The chaotic character’s backstory is taken further than what we see in the movie. As Fynn explains: “He’s not just a random impish sprite who appears and kisses everyone or murders them — he has wants, needs, and desires, and the [creative team] dig into that.”

Given Beetlejuice includes plenty of loving send-ups of other musicals such as Brigadoon, Fynn says he is interpreting his character as a “musical theatre geek” who is “in arrested development, with the emotional maturity of a teenager”. While he can very much identify with the theatre nerd in Beetlejuice, Fynn says the similarities end there: “The rest [of his personality] is too debauched.”

Something he can’t wait to explore with a live audience is breaking the fourth wall, with Beetlejuice acting as narrator, ringmaster and emcee during the show. “Straight away, the audience grasps onto Beetlejuice, which then gives him licence to get away with murder.”

“At the end, he has the audience in the palm of his hand,” adds Halfpenny. “He’s complex, like us all.”

Book Beetlejuice tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

This article first appeared in the June 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.

Photo credit: Aimie Atkinson, David Fynn, Chelsea Halfpenny. (Photos by Matt Crockett). Inset: production photography by Johan Persson