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Mickey Jo
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Excuse me. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theater themed YouTube channel and happy Halloween. If you are in fact seeing this on Halloween, it's Halloween while I'm filming this, so who knows what has happened. Do you like my spooky pseudo vampiric curls? Much like eyebrows, they are sisters and not twins or perhaps very close cousins. If you're meeting me for the first time. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theater. I am a theater themed content creator on social media. You can find me here on as well as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter threads. I'm on LinkedIn for business inquiries because I'm also an international professional freelance theatre critic. But today we are not doing anything so serious as reviewing a piece of theatre. Although I am going to the theater later tonight to see a concert version of a new musical called Kin, which I don't know much about and I'm quite excited. But I think it has a slightly spooky vibe which makes sense for why it is being produced right now. And that got me to thinking about all of the other spooky musicals and which one is in fact the spookiest. So today we are going to take a scientific approach. I did used to be a maths teacher to finding out which is the spookiest musical of all time. Now, this is not an exhaustive list. There may be musicals that you love that I haven't included. I've gone for the more mainstream ones. I know there's a lot of sort of like beloved cult shows that exist more in the sort of the fringe, Off Broadway, Off West End realms. At the time of filming this, I'm still not that familiar with Ride the Cyclone. I know a lot of you love it on social media and I really ought to get round to giving it a listen. But feel free to use this as an opportunity to comment down below in the comment section with your favorite spooky musical, whether it's a popular one or a less known title. Sell us on why it's a great show. If you enjoyed today's video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel for more theatre themed videos just like this one. And if you want to see early and exclusive content here on my channel, hit the link in the description and you can sign up to become one of my channel members. For now though, let's see which musical I have determined scientifically to be the spookiest. So when I say spooky, I'm not meaning scary because I feel like there aren't that many legitimately scary musicals, and if there are, it's because a particular production is scary. You know, there's nothing really in the material of any of the shows that I've selected that is sort of overwhelmingly terrifying. I feel like I've been to much scarier plays, for sure, than I have musicals. And that's because with a lot of these musicals, you get the scary aspect, but you also get a little bit of camp alongside that and the fusion of those two ideas. Scary and camp is where you find the concept of spooky. So, like I said, I'm taking a scientific approach to this, and I'm going to tabulate these results. Hold on. I need a set of axes. Okay, I see what's happened here. When you Google axes, like an X and Y axis, you get pictures of axes. Also spooky, but not what we are going for specifically today. Okay, so on our X axis, then we have camp, and on our Y axis, we have scary. And so something that perfectly balances the two, it stands to reason, is where we will find the spooky scale. There we go. Science. That's science, everybody. That's what science looks like. Okay, so who is our first musical? So, in no particular order, then the first one I have on this list is the Addams Family. So the Addams Family, which was just announced, is coming back to the UK in a concert production starring Ramin Karimlou, Michelle Visage and Leslie Joseph. That's some exceptional casting right there. I've seen this show before on tour twice, I believe. And, you know, it definitely has that gothic element. It has these beloved Gothic characters. It's a popular title for amateur dramatic groups around the country, especially around the end of October. It's a good Halloween show, but where exactly does it fall on the scary camp and ultimately spooky scale? Where are you going to go? Addams Family. So it is definitely campy. It is decidedly campy. Morticia sings a song called Death is Just around the Corner where she's longing for the sweet embrace of the afterlife. If you don't know the plot of the show, it takes the iconic Addams Family characters and puts them in a slightly uncomfortable situation of meeting the parents of Wednesday's boyfriend, Lucas, who are, of course, a normal family. And so it's the juxtaposition of the two different worlds. Definitely camp. And it's gothic, for sure. I don't know that it's exceptionally scary, but then it depends how I'm measuring scary, because, you know, it does embrace all of those sort of gothic aesthetic elements. I'm gonna give this, you know, at least a five, maybe a six for scary. I also don't think it's the campus thing ever. So I think it probably sits around the same place. Let's call it five scary and six camp. Which would put us about here. There we go. That's where the Addams Family is going to be. Now, science tells us the closest something is to that central line, the spookier it is. And so the further along the line, the higher and further to the right of our graph, the spookier it is as well. Who's next? What do we have? American Psycho. So this was a short lived Broadway musical based on the iconic book which was adapted for film, of course, starring Christian Bale. I saw this before it even made it to Broadway. I saw it off West End at the Almeida Theatre starring Doctor who's Matt Smith. Big change of pace for him. He had just done Doctor who and this was kind of the beginning of the rest of his career. Post who. And it is definitely bleak. And blood. It's a little bit camp, but it is for sure scarier than it is camp. I'm gonna give this an 8 scary. There was a lot of blood. There is a lot of chainsaw murdering. If you don't know the plot of this show, that's barely a spoiler. It happens all the time. So we're gonna call this eight scary and just maybe three camp. I think that's where American Psycho is gonna fit up there on our graph. So not quite as spooky, but definitely Halloween adjacent. Next. From chainsaw murders to a simple razor blade, we are talking about Sweeney Todd. The demon. Fleet Street Sweeney Todd is a Stephen Sondheim musical that follows the exploits of the demon barber, Sweeney Todd. This is a Sweeney Todd necklace I'm wearing that just jingled at that appropriate moment. How spooky. Who murders the customers of his shaving parlour and his accomplice Mrs. Lovett, who turns them into pies? This is a show that with all of its material intact, with like all of the Judge Turpin stuff and in like the bloodiest version you've ever seen can be really scary. I think the scariest I've seen this. I mean, the recent, the current Broadway revival has some really intense and thrilling lighting moments. Some of the flashback stuff is really traumatizing with like explaining the context of his backstory. Josh Groban is not the scariest Sweeney Todd I've ever seen. One of the scariest Sweeney Todd performances I've ever seen was actually given by Imelda Staunton in the last major London revival in, like, 2010, 2011. She was playing Mrs. Lovett, and she was very funny, but also modulated a handful of Mrs. Lovett's most comedic lines and turned them into these grippingly chilling, terrifying moments. The line she normally has that diffuses the tension after Sweeney Todd sings, I'm alive at last and I'm full of joy. The subtext being he's about to kill a bunch of people. Normally she says, that's all very well, dear, and sort of snuffs out the flames of his rage. And they go into the comedic number A Little Priest, which is a great song in the London revival. She slowly walks over to him, and while painstakingly, slowly delivering the line with a breath in between each word, she slowly takes the razor out of his hand. Also, the way that they stage de right at the end of that show as well, I'm not gonna spoil it for you. But so cool and terrifying. So Sweeney Todd absolutely has the capabilities to be very scary. I'm gonna call it nine scary. Sweeney is giving you the scary. Lovett is giving you the camp. I think for sure. Like Annaleigh Ashford dials up the camp in this version. So it really depends on what production you get as to where this falls on the scale. If I'm just looking at the material, then I guess Mrs. Lovett's capacity for camp puts this at at least a four. We're gonna give this a nine scary and a four camp. Next we have Little Shop of Horrors, a musical that is currently running off Broadway. I saw it twice this year in that production with different cast members. It's been adapted for a film. It's a popular show for high schools to perform. And yet it is more than a little bit bloodthirsty because it is about skid row resident Seymour Krelbourne, who works at Mushnik's flower shop with the girl of his dreams, Audrey. She's in a toxic relationship with a dentist. Listen, we've all been there. But Seymour's fortune are transformed by his discovery of a carnivorous plant. One that promises to give him everything he ever wanted as long as he satiates the plant's desire for human blood. So definitely a bloodthirsty show, but a decidedly camp one at the same time. There's a sort of a fable in it somewhere. Mostly it's just great songs and fun characters, and it's such a classic musical. You can't not love Little Shop of Horrors. This is like an 8 or a 9 level of camp between Audrey and the urchins and the plant as well. It's a very campy show. We're gonna go. We're gonna go nine on camp. And like, where was the Addams Family? The Addams Family was a five. I think this is slightly more bloodthirsty than the Addams Family. I think this is probably like a 7 on scary. It can be in some productions. Am I overdoing that? Maybe a six. We're gonna go nine and six for Little Shop of Horrors. Nine camp, six scary. That puts it pretty close to that spooky line, but nothing's really hitting the middle. So a musical with a similar plot to Little Shop of Horrors is Be More Chill. This is a musical written by Joe Iconis. It was first performed in New Jersey at the Two River Theatre, which I recently visited. And you may be questioning why I've put Be More Chill on this list. Not only does it have a song literally called Halloween, it's one of many high school based musicals to depict a Halloween party. Duh, duh duh, it's Halloween. But it also has the 21st century version of a Little Shop of Horrors kind of a story where our central character of Jeremy here, who just longs for popularity and longs to be able to not only survive the high school experience, but to thrive. Before he gets to college, his bully Rich offers him the opportunity to buy what is called a squip, which is this sort of a black market pill from Japan that is going to form the supercomputer in his mind and solve all of his problems for him. And it begins to. But not everything is quite as straightforward as he expected, as you might be expecting. Now, this is not a particularly scary show. It's a little bit campy. If you know one song from this show, it's probably Michael in the Bathroom, because that went on to be a really popular standalone song, especially because of George Salazar's original performance. It's a great piece of musical theatre writing. My favorite song might be the Smartphone Hour. It's a song in which various characters gossip about what had happened the night before at Rich's Halloween party. And that's definitely one of the campy moments of the show. It has its campy moments for sure. I'm going to call this at least a four camp and probably a like a two scary. So it's gonna go there. It's not far from our spooky line. You know, this kind of is almost hitting the spooky vibe, but it's also very low down on the line itself. So it's a little bit spooky, but it's not all the way to like the heights of spooky. Dom, that's not a word. We're going to keep going. What else do we have? Now I've put ghost on this list because, you know, there's an element of the afterlife. This is based on the iconic film with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore doing pottery from beyond the grave together while someone sings oh my love. The stage version, meanwhile, premiered in the West End with Casey Levy and Richard Fleesman and Sharon D. Clarke. I never got to see that West End version. I did see it on tour, but it was like a subsequent tour where they dialed back some of the magical effects, which was a little bit disappointing. It also had a little bit of a short lived Broadway life. But many of the songs from its cast recording do live on, especially in the audition rep folders of musical theatre gals. So where are we putting ghost on this? I mean it's, it's a little bit scary. I guess Oda Mae Brown brings the camp, but the whole thing mostly tends towards the more sincere. So I'm gonna call this probably the least camp show we've looked at so far. Maybe a 2, but it's also not that scary. Maybe like a 3 or a 4 scary. I suppose there's like moments of early threat involved. Let's call this a four, let's call this four scary and two camp. Putting it there on the scale. Next up, Young Frankenstein. So this is a Mel Brooks musical based on the Mel Brooks film. The film which originally starred Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder. The stage version in I want to say like 2007, 2008 starred Roger Bart, who had previously been in another Mel Brooks musical, the Producers. Young Frankenstein was not quite as successful as the Producers, but for fans of this genre it's every bit as good. And it actually had a stacked cast. Megan Mullally was in this. Sutton Foster was in this. Christopher Fitzgerald was in this. Andrea Martin. It was a great cast of characters. Now this is high camp. This is exceptional camp, as all Mel Brooks things are. And it is this Frankensteinian story, but it's not a particularly scary version of, of it. So, you know, this plays more towards just generally campy than spooky adjacent. We're gonna give it a score. So I think in terms of camp, this is a 10. This is 10 out of 10. Camp is it scary? Not especially. It's probably like a 4 or a 5 scary. Not even that. Maybe like a 3 scary. We're gonna go 10 camp, 3 scary. I mean, it has, you know, the Frankenstein element, but it's never once played any kind of dramatically. There's a bloodthirsty mob, but they are less threatening than the alt, not very threatening mob in Beauty and the Beast. Honestly, they mostly just dance. Next we have Frank Wildhorn's Jekyll and Hyde. Now, this is an absolute guilty pleasure show for me. This was the first show I ever performed in and so getting to know the material as part of that process was a little bit of an adventure because there's some brilliant, lasting, great songs in this score. Frank Wildhorn knows how to write, especially for the female vocal range, thrillingly well when you have numbers like Someone like you and A New Life and In His Eyes. Come on now, the musical theatre bliss that is Lucy and Emma duetting on In His Eyes Unparalleled. However, the show does also have its campy moments with songs like Murder Murder. I've talked about this in a previous video when I roasted some of my least favourite Broadway lyrics, but it features such gems as to kill outside St. Paul's requires a lot of balls and plenty more that we won't go into. But Jekyll and Hyde is definitely sort of accidentally camp, which is sometimes the most fun thing to be. Not necessarily, if you're looking for critical, but it's what makes it the perfect guilty pleasure kind of a show. It is also scary. You know, you have these dramatic transformations. You have a handful of murders. There's a song about the murders, but the song about the murders is a campy song about the murders. So, you know, there's a balance there. I'm going to call this like a seven camp, because it's not trying to be camp, it just accidentally manages to be sometimes. But I think it's also a 6 scary. So we're going to give it 6 scary, 7 camp, which puts it pretty close to that central line. Does that make Jekyll and Hyde the spookiest show so far? I think it's just about taking that title. But it is not the only musical based on a gothic novel, because we also have Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux's the Phantom of the Opera. Now, it's worth saying, and this really ought to be a bigger video. Andrews is not the only Phantom of the Opera adaptation. There are multiple other versions. In fact, at least two of which were being produced in London simultaneously at one point. But Andrews is far and away the most well known. And again, it's a gothic show. It goes more for epic romance than it does for spooky or scary. But I think it definitely belongs on this list. You know, we have some murders, we have this obsessive, masked impresario who is just desperately wanting to bang this beautiful young soprano. So he gives her vocal tuition via a one way mirror and abducts her to his spooky lair in a lake. And you know, who among us hasn't considered it? But with characters like the managers, who are meant to inject a little bit of comic relief, and someone like Carlotta Giudicelli, who is this enraged diva, and songs like notes. There are also some campy moments, some of which are deliberate campy moments, and some of which like parts of the staging where they all decide towards the end that they're going to defy the Phantom's instructions and all walk forwards like they're posing for an album cover. Less deliberate. I mean, when the Phantom abducts Christine and takes her down to his lair, he sings a song called the Music of the Night. And then he, like, has this bit of staging where he pushes her face away while singing Turn youn Face Away, but just pushes her whole face. And then she faints at the end because she sees a mannequin that he's made to look like her with a wedding dress on, which is, you know, anywhere between a red flag and just like slightly overplaying your hand to get out of the friend zone. So I'm here to tell you it's camp. It's a campy musical, even if it doesn't know that it is. The Phantom doesn't know he's camp, but I know he's camp. Your camp, Beric, honestly, it sits in a pretty similar place to Jekyll and Hyde, but it's a little less camp. I'm gonna call this like a five camp and maybe like a six scary. So another one very close to that spooky line. Next up, a musical called the Grinning Man. This may be one of the lesser known shows to you because it hasn't been produced in all that many places. It first appeared at the Bristol Old Vic. It was subsequently produced at what was then the Trafalgar Studios in London. And I was really haunted by this show after I saw it. It had a fantastic central performance from Louis Mascul, Julie Atherton being terrific, Mark Anderson being absolutely scene stealing. And it's Another sort of macabre adaptation of a story about a man called Grin Payne, who was facially deformed as a child. Sound familiar? Phantom of the Opera. But not unlike the Joker from Christopher Nolan's Batman. His mouth was slashed, giving him this unnaturally wide, horrifying, but simultaneously enchanting smile. The whole thing takes place in a distorted, dystopian version of London, where the previously wealthy areas are thought of as the dingier and the previously less affluent areas are now where the royal palace is. Their royal palace is in Catford, for example. The royal family is a little bit obnoxious and more than a little bit incestuous. So definitely campy elements creeping into this, but it's certainly very scary. I'm gonna call this maybe the scariest show I've seen. There are some really chilling moments from what I remember of this. This is a nine. Scary for me and probably like a six. Camp. This is gonna go up, make a cast recording of the show. I don't know how widely available it is. I would encourage you to go and look up anything you can from the Grinning Man. It's a very intriguing show. Next up, we have the one you've been waiting for. It is Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. We have to talk about Beetlejuice when we are talking about spooky musicals. This, of course, had two little stints on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre and then at the Marquee Theatre, which closed before I ever got the chance to go to New York. And we are impatiently waiting for some kind of announcement about when Beetlejuice might arrive in the uk. For anyone hoping that I would be able to bring you news or rumors in this video, nothing unfortunately has changed. I think it's still slowly making its way over here. There is still the intention to bring the show here. As of right now, I have heard nothing specific. You can currently see it on a Norwegian cruise line in a slightly condensed cruise line production. Fun fact, but this is another one similar to Adam's family that is not exceptionally scary. Just Delia's character alone really dials up the camp. This is the character played by Leslie Kritzer in the original version. And then also the. The whole Miss Argentina sequence in the underworld and the characterization of Beetlejuice as originally played by Alex Brightman. It's a lot campier than the original source material was. The film is a lot scarier and a lot bleaker. The stage show is a lot sort of more light and. And comedic. Maybe like a 4 scary. I haven't actually had the chance to see Beetlejuice. I have watched some recordings, but I don't have the strongest idea of this material. So if you think I'm putting this one in the wrong place, let me know in the comment section down below. I think like a 4 scary and like an 8 camp. I think it's, it's pretty campy. Who is next? Oh, the Rocky Horror Show. The Rocky Horror Show. Now you may have seen the film adaptation on stage. It's a little bit different. And you know there's different ways to see Rocky Horror Live because there's this whole legacy where you have performances like of the film and people reenact it in front of the film and you can throw things. And that's a whole subculture of its own. You also have the staged version as a musical. This has been touring the UK forever. And there are different callbacks that you can shout out as audience members which are basically written into the script. And longtime fans of the show will know all of them. Going and seeing Rocky Horror Live is absolutely an experience. It is also high camp. It's an incredibly campy show. It's a send up of like these old movies, some great tunes, some enduringly very great tunes. I mean, the Time Warp is iconic. If people are putting together a Halloween playlist, the time warp probably ought to be on there. But this show is definitely 10 out of 10 camp. It does have a couple of bloodthirsty moments, but given that the whole thing gives way to this nonsensical abstract floor show in the second act with feather boas and lingerie, it's not explicitly the scariest thing. It goes more sci fi than it does scary. So we're gonna call this five scary, but 10 out of 10 camp. We also have Carrie, a musical version of the Stephen King novel, which has also been adapted for film. Now the original version of Carrie that was first produced here in the UK before transferring to a famously short lived Broadway run is iconic for a handful of the wrong reasons. And that production was definitely campier than subsequent versions of the show that have since resurfaced, including a pretty major off Broadway revival about a decade ago. Sequences like out for Blood, where Charlotte d'amboise and the original cast was dancing around in a full red outfit as they're trying to get this pig's blood to pour over Carrie at the high school prom because they're bullying her. She's this daughter of an obsessive religious mother who is abusing her. She develops telekinetic powers as you do in that kind of a situation. And it's a horror stories interpretation of coming of age. And she enacts the kind of revenge on the school and her classmates that a lot of people might wish to in those kind of situations. But definitely scary. We're calling this 10 out of 10 scary. And like I said, the original production, pretty campy. Subsequent versions of the show, not that campy. I think on the basis of this material it's probably down to like a three campy. It's great material. I will listen to the song Carrie and In and the Night Will Never Forget and oh, the World According to Chris. Great songs, honestly great songs, but we're gonna put this one up here. Ten scary, but only three campy. Now before I get to our final entrant, I want to give out some honorable mentions for shows I just don't know well enough to put them on this list. But Batboy is a medium that exists that's actually being performed tonight at the London Palladium. And I kind of wish I was gonna get to see it because I've never seen it before. I don't really know what it's like. There is a musical version of Dracula. There's also Lestat. Obviously anything vampire inclusive or vampire adjacent is gonna be spooky. There's also Evil Dead. That's a cult show I really know nothing about. Feel free to tell me more about it in the comments section down below. The last one I have on this list is the musical Rebecca. Now this for me definitely belongs in spooky territory. This is another musical adaptation of a novel. A novel originally written by Daphne Dumour. Laurier. If you don't know anything about Rebecca, there's a great documentary you can watch about the show's ill fated attempts to get to Broadway over on my friend Brendan's channel here on YouTube. That's weight in the wings, but it's the story of a nameless protagonist who marries a wealthy man and comes to find out that there is this mystery and intrigue around his recently deceased first wife, Rebecca. She Encounters the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who is about as far from being over it as a person can possibly be. And the plot unfolds from there. Now it's. It's kind of scary. It has its haunting moments, but it's not explicitly scary. It's more just sort of an intriguing sort of a dark romance. But it is also a little bit campy. Unlike Jekyll and Hyde in Phantom of the Opera, I think there are moments where it's sort of accidentally campy. Like the volume with which the wind says Rebecca when Mrs. Danvers is throwing open the windows, when she's dramatically reprising this title song over and over and over. It's camp in a good way. Like camp is nothing to be ashamed of, but there's a definite element of camp. I'm gonna call this like five campy and just three scary. Putting it there, which is the spookiest musical of all time. I'm not sure that we came to any kind of a conclusion, honestly. This is just a mess of different shows. I think Jekyll and Hyde and Phantom of the Opera in the middle there were some of the closest. But I'm intrigued about what you think. So of all the shows mentioned so far, which do you think is the spookiest? Thank you so much for watching today's spooky musical theater video. I hope that you enjoyed. If you did, make sure to subs to my theatre themed YouTube channel for many more videos coming very soon. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a spooky and stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.