Credit where it’s due, Beetlejuice should not work on stage, and there are moments where it barely does, but thanks to its self-aware wry humour we are all saved, just about, from a complete car crash. But it is tragic how fundamentally the show fails to find itself, in what should have been one of the easiest IP-based transfers from Broadway.

Vitally, Beetlejuice is so British. Isn’t it? The humour and the morbidity are ripe for a London audience. And yet it’s as funny as a coffin in the wrong grave. You can laugh about it later, but in the moment it’s mortifying.

I think the show shrunk in the Atlantic on the way over. The musical is a huge, sweeping spectacle, with the jokes to match, but because the set is laughably designed to tour, the effects are tiny, resembling something you might get in a pre-show at a major theme park. The joke becomes the show itself, and it’s all a bit embarrassing, particularly as the cast are phenomenal.

If this show had the scale, it would be brilliantly funny. I did laugh. There are great gags, but they’re great because they don’t need spectacle to make them funny. When the show needs to expand as the film we know and love gets more absurd, the production has already reached its peak. It’s frustrating.

What’s perhaps even more annoying is that the story has already been shuffled around to accommodate the staging, and I actually have very little to say about the narrative changes. It works. We just don’t get the scale it demands.

The attempts to localise the humour don’t help. The only recent and inherently British references seem to be about Paddington the Musical. Which, given the announcement of Beetlejuice‘s early closing and implied failure, just feels like it’s in bad taste. A terrible and twisted irony.

And for heaven’s sake, if you’re not going to give a West End audience the full scale and spectacle of the damn show, at least reduce the timings of your transitions.

So much of the show is spent watching one of three stupid projections on a curtain. Half of the curtain would then rise to reveal a third of a set, before the process repeated on the other side of the stage. Worse still, actors move upstage mid-song to get out of the way of the curtain and accommodate these changes. And… some of the furniture is simply pushed around the stage. There is no consistency.

If there had been a toddler within reach, I would have launched them over the lighting rig of the circle. I reached Hades levels of anger. I did go on to talk to my therapist about my anger.

The attic looked like it belonged to a completely different building. It took several visits to this location for me to realise that I was, in fact, not inside a garden shed with these characters.

In order to make the set appear expansive, they’ve played with forced perspective, and it simply doesn’t work. The main house looks as though it were fed into a crusher before they realised they would need the set for the UK. The projection mapping doesn’t quite align with the scenery either, which you don’t really notice until you’ve noticed it, and then it’s all you can see. The projection mapping is barely used.

The show can feel quite pantomimey. That should be a compliment, but pantomime is a very serious business in the UK, and the comparison is not a kind one. It just looks bad.

The cast do their best with what they’ve been given. Vocally, they’re faultless, but the score is largely forgettable and the characters aren’t strong enough to carry this heightened version of the story.

Thankfully, the characterisations do not directly echo the performances from the film. This would have been the final nail in the coffin. There’s just enough recognisability to keep fans pleased, but it feels like the cast all got to weave themselves into their roles, and they absolutely shine in doing so.

One particular highlight is Hannah Nordberg as Lydia Deetz. Astonishing, believable and the only character afforded any real dimension, she is the standout performance of the evening.

I will continue to consult my therapist, however. It is plausible that I missed something here, because the audience couldn’t get up quick enough at the end of the show. No, not to leave. To give Beetlejuice a standing ovation. The mind boggles.

Unless that’s just something we do now. At all productions. So it means absolutely nothing.