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Seventeen, Sardonic, and Ready to Sing in ‘Beetlejuice’

Like it or not, Sophia Anne Caruso has a type. “Dead girls. Sad girls. Raped girls,” she said mordantly. “Seems kind of like my thing.”

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Seventeen, Sardonic, and Ready to Sing in ‘Beetlejuice’
By
Alexis Soloski
, New York Times

Like it or not, Sophia Anne Caruso has a type. “Dead girls. Sad girls. Raped girls,” she said mordantly. “Seems kind of like my thing.”

Caruso is just 17. Sweet? Not exactly. In Jennifer Haley’s “The Nether” she played an online avatar who invites her own rape and murder. In Enda Walsh and David Bowie’s “Lazarus” she was the otherworldly innocent singing “Life on Mars.” In David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” her Broadway debut, she appeared in the final scene as the stepdaughter of a convicted sex offender. Need a creepy ingénue and an all-out triple threat? Get in line.

In “Beetlejuice,” a musical adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton horror comedy that begins previews Sunday at Washington’s National Theater and will transfer to Broadway in March, Caruso will originate the role of Lydia, the goth-struck, ultra-haunted, black-is-how-I-feel-on-the-inside teenage girl. (It’s the part that made a star of a permafrown Winona Ryder.) It requires, the show’s director Alex Timbers said, “someone who inhabits darkness and hope and wit and humor and vulnerability. She can do all that.”

Lydia is the role Caruso has waited to play her whole not-especially-long life. It’s her first Broadway lead. Her first almost-adult part. Then again, she’s been almost-adult from the get-go.

“I never really had a childhood,” Caruso said, on a recent afternoon just before the company left for Washington. Slender, soft-spoken, guarded, Caruso has the look of a small and very serious bird. A bird with a passion for platform boots.

She grew up in Spokane, Washington, the daughter of Deena Caruso, who owned several clothing and jewelry stores, and Steve Caruso, a former professional golfer who now works for a senior living company. The youngest of three, Caruso would vie for attention, singing, dancing, ordering her parents to the couch and saying, “Watch me! Watch me! Watch me!”

She began to audition for children’s theater when she turned 7. At 10, she was cast in a local production of “Ruthless! The Musical” — a parody version of the tyke chiller “The Bad Seed,” the only role she could find “that was crazy and wild,” she said.

During a technical rehearsal, her adult co-star apparently had a heart attack and died on the other side of her entrance door. When she learned that the show would be revived in New York, she wrote to the producers with kid sang-froid, acknowledging the tragedy and assuring them that she knew all the songs.

Around that time, Caruso arrived in Manhattan to audition for an “Annie” revival — a New York Times photographer captured her rehearsing on the sidewalk. She asked to move to New York. Her mother agreed, even though it meant “giving up everything I had worked my entire life for,” said Deena Caruso, speaking from her home in New Jersey a few days later. “We have a saying in our family,” she added. “It’s called, ‘Roll the dice.’ ” The family rolled.

Caruso landed a television role on “Smash” and then a part in the live “The Sound of Music.” She was cast in Susan Stroman’s “Little Dancer” at the Kennedy Center, playing the younger sister to Tiler Peck’s ballerina.

She was grateful for these roles. But they weren’t necessarily the roles she wanted. “Even from a young age, I had very finicky taste,” she said. “A lot of kid roles are not authentic,” she added.

During “Little Dancer,” she took the train to New York to audition for “The Nether,” a difficult, often-harrowing play in which characters visit a virtual reality where they rape and kill. Caruso, dressed in high-necked Victoriana, was their victim. Not that she played it that way.

“There was a rigor that she had,” Anne Kauffman, the play’s director, recalled. “She’s ambitious and not just professionally. She’s ambitious for life. She is hungry for depth and understanding and exploration.” That hunger led her to “Lazarus,” to “Blackbird.”

Caruso talks every script over with her parents, and her mother researches “every single person that’s involved to make sure that she is safe,” Deena Caruso said. Caruso’s parents know that their daughter is drawn to what Deena Caruso calls, “things that are just edgy.” They go to the edge with her, walking her home from the stage door after.

“Beetlejuice” is the first show she has rehearsed away from her parents. “Last night was the first night that she’s ever been alone,” Deena Caruso said. “She’s in D.C. on her own.” She sounded as if she were crying.

I had worried, maybe unfairly, about that never-had-a-childhood stuff. But Caruso said childhood never interested her. “I just never got along with kids my age,” she said. “I just didn’t relate.”

Her colleagues and family describe a preternaturally poised and diligent performer. Both Kauffman, “The Nether” director, and Alex Brightman, who stars with her in “Beetlejuice” and who’d supplied the temporary tattoo she wore that morning (“a watercolor of a flower situation,” Caruso said), used the exact same phrase to describe her: “more mature than any of us.” Condescend at your own risk.

Every so often, Caruso wonders if she’ll wake up at 98 with regrets, but she doesn’t think so. I asked her, mostly joking, if she’d miss never having gone to prom — I guess I was thinking of “Pretty in Pink” — and she looked at me with high disdain and said, “That kind of thing — I just — no.”

Does she go out with friends? Not really. What does she do for fun? She reads. She watches old movies. She plays with her dog. She bakes. She’d prepared treats for the cast that morning, vegan and gluten free. (At this point, her personal press representative, who had hovered in a corner, broke in to assure me that Caruso did have age-appropriate friends, that she did have fun.)

But if Caruso is preternaturally mature, she is also very much a teenager with a teenager’s sarcasm and sensitivity to phoniness. (Several colleagues noted her eye rolling, affectionately.) She teases Brightman about his age; he’s an ancient 31. He teases her about her seriousness. If something in a script feels forced or — her word — “cheesy,” she makes it known. She rolled her eyes when she received the casting breakdown for “Beetlejuice.” Movies made into musicals? Cheesy. And an all-male creative team? Ugh. “It’s hard when you have men writing young women or women in general,” she said. But the script won her over. She thought it did right by Lydia, by her struggles. “I look at her and my heart just wrenches,” she said.

What’s in that script? I can’t really tell you. The production team would share only three quotations; at least one was from the movie. But here’s how Lydia announces herself: “Greetings, ghosts. My name is Lydia Deetz. Do not be afraid.”

So yes, this Lydia is brave, sardonic, soulful, honest, resilient, wise beyond her years. And in one scene, Caruso revealed delightedly, she gets to handle a chain saw.

“Lydia and I have a lot in common,” she said. “That’s unusual. I don’t normally have a lot in common with my characters. Normally they’re dead.”

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