When Eddie Perfect walks into Harveys Bar and Bistro on James Street in a black T-shirt, hair teased up noughties-style, it’s hard not to think, “It’s Mick from Offspring”. You half expect Asher Keddie and Kat Stewart to walk in behind him.
The series ended in 2014, but Perfect, 48, is still recognised for it, even by Americans on the streets of New York City, where his career has taken him in the years since. (Ten’s show is enjoying a Netflix afterlife.)
Offspring was “an extraordinary experience”, Perfect says. “It was the longest job I’ve ever had in my life, by far. By the time they were wrapping up, I was already involved in doing Beetlejuice.”
Perfect is in Brisbane attending rehearsals for the launch of the macabre musical’s Australian tour. As well as composing music and lyrics, he played the title role in its rave-reviewed 2025 Melbourne season.
That is no longer the case; US performer Andy Karl is playing the lecherous, fourth-wall-breaking demon “bio-exorcist” in the show’s Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney runs.
Perfect is bowing out because he has other writing projects to focus on. He also wants to be at home in Melbourne for his teenage daughters, who are studying for their VCEs. And there’s one other reason.
“It was really f—ing hard,” he says.
Writing the songs for Beetlejuice was the opportunity of a lifetime – he just wasn’t expecting to be performing them. “And Alex Brightman, who originated the role on Broadway, is so courageous, you could throw him anything and he would just do it.
“When it came to me doing it, I was like: ‘I haven’t given the actor anywhere to breathe! The first 25 minutes are running around the stage like crazy!’ I had to get super fit.
“And the worst thing was I couldn’t complain to anyone because it was all my fault.”
It’s been 12 years since Perfect’s miraculous Broadway breakthrough, but it’s still astonishing that it happened.
Growing up in Mentone, the bayside suburb haunted by air traffic from Melbourne’s second-busiest airport, Perfect listened obsessively to his parents’ original cast albums of Fiddler on the Roof and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
He studied musical theatre at WAAPA in Perth. After appearing in Casey Bennetto’s Keating! he hit on the idea of Shane Warne: The Musical.
“[Warne] hated the idea, he said there should be a law against writing musicals about people,” Perfect recalls.
After the second preview, Perfect was invited to meet Warnie in a restaurant across the street from the theatre. “Every instinct in me wanted to just run away. I was dipped head to toe in fake tan and blond hair, I looked just like him.
“He said, ‘I loved it. You really captured my naughty, cheeky larrikin side, thank you so much.’ The only thing he suggested was that I was wearing the wrong colour underwear under my cricket whites.”
Perfect contributed some songs to the Strictly Ballroom musical, but was aching to create something of his own that could play worldwide.
“I was lamenting the fact that probably wouldn’t happen in Australia, and then my wife got sick of my complaining and encouraged me to just buy a ticket and go to New York.”
The kids were little, so they made a pact: Perfect would only go to the Big Apple for two weeks at a time. He saw all the shows that he could, and took notes about producers and directors. He found an agent and started getting meetings.
“And then I heard that Beetlejuice was being developed as a musical by Warner Bros [Theatre Ventures], that their attached director was Alex Timbers, and I’d just seen his production of Rocky on Broadway. I asked my agent if I could pitch [for] Beetlejuice.”
Broadway production companies have budgets to pay artists to write example scripts and songs. Perfect was told they didn’t want to spend it on an unknown property from Australia.
“And I was like, if money’s the barrier, I’ll just write songs for free. I thought the most that I would get out of it was to show I could write to an American brief. I didn’t think in a million years I’d get the gig. I was gobsmacked.”
What followed was five years of travel between Melbourne and New York for workshops, reads and sing-throughs.
“I didn’t think in a million years I’d get the gig. I was gobsmacked.”
A surprise smash hit when released in 1988, the Beetlejuice movie made both director Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s careers, but is actually more about the Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), the newly dead couple who need the help of Beetlejuice to scare off the family that moves into their house.
The musical (the book is by Americans Scott Brown and Anthony King) puts more focus on the Winona Ryder character, Lydia Deetz, the gothic teenager grieving her mother’s death who has a desperate need to be seen.
“She’s the kind of musical theatre protagonist that people identify with: the outsider,” Perfect says.
As for the title character, you can see how the ghost with the most would have been a good fit for Perfect’s spiky comedic writing. Beetlejuice is chaos personified, tossing twisted quips and surreal pranks like so many leg spin balls.
“There’s a tendency to go, maybe I need to play safer and write some nice songs that everyone’s going to enjoy. But I was like: yeah, f— that.”
The Beetlejuice team chose Perfect “because of his cheeky wit and sense of dark whimsy, and because he’s able to find depths of empathy for misfit characters”, Timbers wrote in an email.
Timbers also praised Perfect’s “willingness to keep iterating on ideas until they land completely with an audience”.
When Beetlejuice finally opened for a tryout in Washington, DC in 2018, Perfect took the leap and moved his family to the Upper West Side of New York. The show transferred to Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre the following March.
By that time, Perfect was working simultaneously on new songs for the Australian King Kong musical’s Broadway run. He recalls standing on the street in 2019 and being able to see the King Kong marquee in one direction and the Beetlejuice marquee in the other.
“If I had my choice, I would never do two musicals at the one time,” Perfect says. “One musical is a killer.”
The pressure of Broadway was “immense”.
“It’s time pressure, it’s money pressure, it’s the pressure of no one’s got a crystal ball, no one knows what the right answer is.
“I’ve never complained about pressure. For me, pressure is the opposite of obscurity. I remember that feeling of despair – like I’m put on earth to write musicals, but I don’t have any opportunities to write musicals.
“Pressure, at the end of the day, is people giving a shit about what you write.”
Beetlejuice the Musical plays at QPAC, Brisbane, June 7-August 2; Crown Theatre, Perth, August 16-September 20; Festival Theatre, Adelaide, October 10-25; and Capitol Theatre, Sydney, November 21-Jan 10.
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