I imagine being a high schooler today must be hell: the self-esteem drain from social media, the pressures of gender identity, pretending to like Taylor Swift. Then I remember the late ’80s, when my peers and I survived our own preppies vs. stoners teenage inferno. At least I wasn’t a cool kid or jock in danger of being whacked by a snob-hating serial killer. That’s the black-comic premise of the 1989 satire Heathers, which gave a sick twist to John Hughes’ bittersweet coming-of-age formula. The cult movie was adapted into a clever high-energy 2014 musical, which returns to New World Stages looking superfine and hitting different. Heathers The Musical has become big-tent IP: bridging Gens X and Z in mutual loathing (and yes, longing) for those gorgeous color-coordinated goddesses who rule the hallways.
You’re acquainted with the Heathers, right? (Drop two letters and they’re haters.) In order of increasing mean-girlness, they are Heather McNamara (Elizabeth Teether), a secretly insecure cheerleader; Heather Duke (Olivia Hardy) the quiet seething beta waiting for her chance; and Heather Chandler (McKenzie Kurtz), a gleeful sadist and “mythic bitch,” per hero-narrator Veronica (Lorna Courtney). Veronica is empathetic and artsy, eager to graduate and get away to college. Though sensible, even she is not immune to the allure of popularity. In the first ten minutes, Veronica agrees to a makeover—the Heathers want to exploit her forgery skills—and becomes the fourth wheel. (In the movie, Winona Ryder’s Veronica was already a skeptical satellite of the triad.)
When Veronica witnesses the sardonic Baudelaire-quoting J.D. (Casey Likes) stand up to and beat homophobic jocks Kurt (Cade Ostermeyer) and Ramm (Xavier McKinnon), she’s fascinated and turned on. Later, at a party, when Veronica refuses to play a cruel prank on the overweight outcast Martha (Erin Morton) and drunkenly beds J.D., her fate is sealed. J.D., a sociopathic manipulator traumatized by a dead mother and psycho dad, coerces Veronica into ridding herself of these evil queens the easiest way possible: slipping the Heather Chandler Drano in a coffee mug. Faster than you can say, “fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Veronica ambivalently accepts her role as shoulder-padded Mrs. Lovett to J.D.’s trench-coated Sweeney Todd.
In the eleven years since it ran Off Broadway, the musical has evolved, and so has the target audience. A slightly retooled version opened in London in 2018, selling out and moving to the West End and touring the U.K. The current production (directed, like the New York and London incarnations, by Andy Fickman) has been extended through January. Already, the crowds for previews (at least the one I attended) are treating Heathers like a long-running smash. No surprise, really. With a couple of cast albums out there, the bright and bouncy retro pop score by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe has inspired countless TikTok reenactments. There’s a built-in fandom for the material which, after all, shares tropes with titles as diverse as Wicked, Dear Evan Hansen and Hairspray. The ridiculously stacked cast even includes an alum from the Hairspray OBC: adorable Kerry Butler as a media-hungry school counselor who gloms onto the rash of “suicides” plaguing Westerberg High.
Jokes about suicide? Football dads coming out at their sons’ funeral? A show that opens with students singing a barrage of hate speech: “Freak! Slut! Cripple! Homo!” Satire is not easy to pull off in the current climate; how has this show not been canceled? Perhaps we’re ready to accept that representation is not endorsement. Folks around me roared with joy when the Heathers made their first entrance in a blaze of light. I thought, “You do know they’re the villains, right?” You could argue that years of social media have instilled a greater degree of fame-hunger—maybe also pop conformity—to younger consumers. I get that 26 years after Columbine and with school shootings practically normalized, a gun-toting edgelord like J.D. is impossible to root for, but are narcissistic princesses the alternative? Is it that everyone wants to be an influencer with a million followers?
Perhaps I’m looking at it wrong. The musical, like the movie, advocates kindness and self-acceptance—virtues even the Heathers secretly yearn for despite their status addiction. Perhaps Gen Z is nimble enough to idolize the bitchy trendsetters while at the same time knowing it’s all performative: a person can be Mean Girl and Meek Misfit simultaneously. Kids these days: They contain multitudes… of Instagram filters.
What marks the movie (screenplay by Daniel Waters) as a Gen X icon is its reflexive “plague on both your houses” pessimism. We are the middle-child generation, keenly aware that everything’s an act and the world doesn’t want us. Veronica finds herself trapped between the toxic vanity of the in-crowd and the homicidal insanity of the anarchist. She rejects both. In that sense, perhaps, Gen X and Z share a sardonic-outsider POV.
Beyond its sociological themes, Heathers is a ton of stylish, well-crafted fun with top-notch acting and top-to-bottom earworms. After intermission, the score grows darker and introspective, giving individual characters moments to unburden their hearts. Heather McNamara sings a haunting ditty about the survival game that is high school in Lifeboat, and Martha gets a pathetic Disney-princess “I Want” number at her lowest ebb, Kindergarten Boyfriend. The high-octane banger Candy Store lets the Heathers strut and tease, and there’s my favorite, the wistful Seventeen, a rock ballad about feeling nostalgia for a youth that’s slipping away. David Shields’s dazzling jewel-toned couture and Ben Cracknell’s adrenaline-pumping lights make the show the ocular equivalent of a 7-Eleven Slurpee referenced by J.D. in his ode to numbing the pain: “When the voice in your head / Says you’re better off dead, / Don’t open a vein / Just freeze your brain.” Neat thing about Heathers: it may appear to be coldhearted and ice-blooded, but by the end, there’s a thaw and everyone is part of the club.
Heathers | 2 hrs. 20 mins. One intermission. | New World Stages | 340 West 50th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
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