Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Riverview actor tours North America in musical role
Justin Collette joined the tour in 2022, says every week is different
From Riverview, New Brunswick, to New York City to places all over North America, Justin Collette has been living the dream.
Over the last two years, the musical theatre actor has been performing the title role in the touring company of Beetlejuice.
Collette, who worked on the Broadway production of School of Rock before the pandemic, said with a new city almost every week, he's probably performed in close to 100 places at this point.
"When you perform in New York, I mean, it's so exciting ... people that you know can afford to go to New York, make it there to go see a Broadway show," he told CBC's Shift.
"So it's a different audience ... performing in like Fort Lauderdale, Fla., or … Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
"The crowd sizes are different, the sensibilities are different, politically, people are different."
Classic movie role takes flight on stage
Beetlejuice, a musical based on the classic Tim Burton film, tells the story of Lydia Deetz as she meets a dead couple and a demon — Beetlejuice himself.
One week, the show might be performing to a crowd of 1,000 and the next, it might be 5,000, Collette said.
But each time, he puts on his striped suit, green wig and initiates the character's gravelly voice.
Collette said he's done a lot of voice acting in cartoons, which he thinks has helped with the longevity of a role like Beetlejuice.
"I don't know if I have freak vocal cords, or I'm conditioned for it, but I've just been lucky," he said.
"I'm not a person that loses his voice, so I think it was kind of just some genetic luck lining up with me being obsessed with figuring out how to do it."
And while Collette has played some iconic roles, such as Dewey Finn in School of Rock on Broadway, he hopes to one day originate a role in a musical.
"In musical theater, there usually isn't a lot of wiggle room for you, kind of, making the character your own — people want to see, like, the original versions of the characters," said Collette.
"I've been really lucky that I've had experiences where directors have encouraged me to, like, not copy someone else's work, and I would like to just be on the other side of it, where I get to kind of build it from scratch."
The current schedule for the Beetlejuice North American tour shows it running until July, with more than a month at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto.
Collette said he lived in Toronto for six years and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa was the first big theatre he performed at when he was 15.
"It's going to be like a full-circle moment."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Shift
