She slipped into a striped, black-and-white ’50s pinup dress, lined her eyes with dark circles, covered her mouth with lipstick. Then the wig, a blunt bob with bangs Ruiz trimmed herself.
The cockroaches were the pièce de résistance: fake craft-store bugs, painted a fluorescent chartreuse, sprinkled in her hair and down her dress and through her fingers. With her “Handbook for the Recently Deceased” in tow — illuminated with LED lights that Ruiz had buried within the pages — she was off across town, toward “Beetlejuice” on Broadway.
The transformation took an hour, but the details were crucial. This was Oct. 10, a Thursday — and every Thursday in October, when the musical hosts its preshow costume contest, the competition can get intense.
There are always a handful of Lydias, contestants who go full goth in homage to the teenage antihero’s all-black vibe. Sometimes the Maitlands appear — a Barbara or an Adam, the show’s newly deceased yet not-so-scary couple, demure and suburban in an unassuming green dress or flannel. One winner’s body was painted entirely in a shimmery teal, with a red gown and pageant sash identifying her as Miss Argentina, the Netherworld’s regretful receptionist.
And then, up Ruiz’s alley, are the many, many Beetlejuices: in striped suits and shirts and skirts, faces pale and ghostly, with hair both green (the musical) and white (the 1988 movie).
There are a few ground rules: Your costume has to fit in your seat. (Sorry, sandworms.) No weapons, functional or otherwise, are allowed. (Sorry, musket-wielding shrunken heads.) And stick as close to the musical as you can.
Ruiz had those boxes checked, but she was nervous leaving the office — ghoulish makeup tends to stick out. She knew she’d be in the clear once she hit Times Square, but the commute was a challenge. Ruiz had skipped the crosstown bus in favor of a taxi — “These bugs look pretty cool,” she thought, “and I don’t want to startle anyone” — but rush hour traffic, of course, is Manhattan’s most frightening Halloween scare of all.
When she finally made it to the Winter Garden Theater, Ruiz took a moment and looked around. There was a congregation of young Lydias in black, and a foursome that coordinated to each dress as different characters from the show — and, of course, her fellow green-locked Beetlejuices. She started to cry.
“I was just so happy to be around other people who love the musical as much as I did,” Ruiz said. “Because in normal life, you have a few people that you can share some of your passions with — especially when they’re very specific.”
Taylor Rooker, a 21-year-old Beetlejuice from Orlando, Florida, took several hours and an X-acto knife to create her homemade light-up sign for the Oct. 24 contest. “I flew at 2 a.m. this morning, and I’m flying out at 6 a.m. tomorrow, specifically for this,” she said. “My family thinks I’m insane.”
While “Beetlejuice” opened to mixed reviews, it has been building at the box office, with social media and special engagement efforts part of the strategy. Fan art handed to the cast at the stage door lines the stairwell backstage. Online fans are especially pervasive — particularly on TikTok, where short videos of teenagers lip syncing to the soundtrack have become a far-reaching meme.
Cultish Broadway fan bases are nothing new. But costumed patrons in the seats each night?
“This is blowing me over,” said William Ivey Long, the costume designer to whom fans have been (perhaps unwittingly) paying homage. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Every once in a while, through his decades designing 75 Broadway shows, Long has spotted an audience member in costume: Little girls in sparkling tiaras for “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” a zipper-necked “Young Frankenstein” or two.
But not like the fan response at “Beetlejuice,” he said. “No, I must say, this is something.”
He’s still looking for some of the Beetlejuices to up their game. The ghosts with the most he’s seen so far just aren’t looking quite dead enough.
His suggestion: “Buy a Beetlejuice suit and go to town. Customize it. Try to think of what the earth has done.”
The costume contest extends beyond the Winter Garden. Fans who can’t make it in person can enter the online competition: Sara Poskonka, a body painter from New Jersey, went full aquamarine as Miss Argentina.
Alison Cosgrove, a student at William Paterson University, created a Beetlejuice get-up out of a spray-painted black plastic tablecloth and a Walmart-napkin-turned-necktie.
The costume wasn’t for her, though — it was Xander, her mustang, who rocked the bright green Beetlejuice wig on one ear. “That was a battle to get on,” Cosgrove said.
The winner of the online contest will be announced on Halloween. Each week’s in-the-flesh champions, on the other hand, find out at the Thursday night intermission. At curtain call, after the actors take their bows, the winner is brought onstage and then escorted behind the scenes for a photo with the cast.
Ruiz didn’t enter the contest thinking she would win — which is why the shock of the cast welcoming her onstage, victorious, rendered her silent for a good three minutes.
“We got this gem of a picture, and they saw it and they said, ‘You look like you’re part of the cast,’” Ruiz said. “And I almost absolutely melted on the floor.”
This article originally appeared in
.