When the pitch-black comedy “Heathers” came out in 1989, a review in The New York Times said it was “as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited.” An early scene was said to have “the air of a demonic sitcom.” This may explain why the composer Laurence O’Keefe initially had reservations about working on a musical adaptation.
“I thought it was too nihilistic,” O’Keefe said of the movie, in which a frustrated senior (Winona Ryder) and her murderous boyfriend (Christian Slater) dispatch members of their high school’s bullying elite with theatrical violence. “This material is in some ways more despairing than ‘Sweeney Todd.’”
Yet O’Keefe still thought there was a way to make the story palatable for the stage. He was right: These days, “Heathers: The Musical,” the adaptation he created with the writer Kevin Murphy and the director Andy Fickman, is gaining cult-classic status in its own right.
It took a decade, but in December the Off Broadway production’s cast album, from 2014, went gold. Packed with a mercilessly catchy mix of bangers (“Candy Store”) and ballads (“Seventeen”), the recording was instrumental in fueling a “Heathers” craze in Britain, where the show has had several West End runs and tours, which were further immortalized in a second cast album and a live capture.
Now “Heathers: The Musical” has returned to New World Stages, where it had its original New York engagement back in 2014. This version incorporates changes, including new songs, made to the show in the intervening decade. It will open on July 10 with a sterling cast list led by Lorna Courtney (“& Juliet”) as the arty senior Veronica; Casey Likes (last seen on Broadway in “Back to the Future: The Musical”) as the vengeful J.D.; and McKenzie Kurtz, Elizabeth Teeter and Olivia Hardy as the school’s queen bees, all named Heather.
Tellingly, both Courtney and Likes were introduced to “Heathers” lore not via the movie, but a cast album. “I always was aware of the musical because of people playing the soundtrack constantly in the car, on the way to rehearsals,” said Likes, who once sang part of the J.D. song “Freeze Your Brain” at an audition.
At the first preview, on June 22, the audience let out eardrum-piercing screams after every choice number or quotable line (so many). And then there were the fans known as Corn Nuts (after Heather Chandler’s last words), cosplaying as the color-coded characters, like Pantone swatches for an American teendom moodboard.
In his liner notes for the 2014 album, the film’s screenwriter, Daniel Waters, described his script as hitting “the piñata of maggots dangling above the decade.” How an ’80s teen movie with an apocalyptic bent became an irrepressible musical is a roller-coaster saga of its own.
It started in Los Angeles, in the late 1990s, when the city was experiencing a miniboom of satirical tuners.
O’Keefe had made a splash in 1997 with “Bat Boy: The Musical,” a riff on a tabloid headline about a bat-human hybrid discovered in a cave, that had its premiere with the Actors’ Gang, a company co-founded by Tim Robbins. (The show is due to get the Encores! treatment in October.) The next year, Fickman and Murphy scored a hit of their own with “Reefer Madness,” a musical spoof of the 1930s exploitation film. “We were sort of friendly and competitive,” O’Keefe said, and joining forces made sense.
After lengthy negotiations, in 2007-08 the team obtained the movie rights from Waters (whose brother Mark Waters directed another enormously influential high school film, “Mean Girls”) and the film’s production company — all while holding jobs in film, TV and Broadway, where O’Keefe co-wrote the score for the “Legally Blonde” musical from 2007.
Their taste for satire and transgressive humor would serve them well as they shaped their high school musical, though their adaptation would be far less bleak than the film. “We knew, kind of instinctively, that we couldn’t go wholesale into the darkness,” O’Keefe said. “Instead of being buffeted, pushed from strong personality to strong personality, we wanted to make Veronica notice what’s wrong around her, and want to change it.” As for J.D., he is now more of a wounded soul and less of an obvious sociopath.
From the start the new show attracted rising young actors, drawn to the ripe dialogue, outrageous humor and powerhouse songs. The actress Kristen Bell, an alumna of “Reefer Madness,” played Veronica in readings held in Los Angeles in 2009-10, and Annaleigh Ashford took on the role for a couple of concerts at Joe’s Pub in 2010, opposite Jeremy Jordan (“Floyd Collins”) as J.D.
Ryan McCartan was a star of the Disney Channel series “Liv and Maddie,” where Fickman was a director and executive producer, when he took on the brooding antihero J.D. in 2013. The show had a weekslong run at the Hudson Theater in Los Angeles, and then New World Stages.
To ensure that McCartan could do both jobs at once, the TV show dispatched his character, Diggie, to the imaginary nation of Tundrabania — and Fickman would shoot those scenes at New World Stages, where Disney had shipped costumes and props. “How any of that came together is still beyond me,” the director said. (McCartan made it back safely from Tundrabania and is currently headlining “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway.)
The Off Broadway run closed, after less than five months, in August 2014, which did not bode well for the show’s future. But that was not the end of “Heathers.”
In short order, Murphy and O’Keefe were asked to come up with a high school edition for the publisher Samuel French (later subsumed into Concord Theatricals). They cleaned up the profanity and toned down some of the more outré scenes, and used the opportunity to carry out more drastic changes — starting with cutting a song about sexual frustration called “Blue.”
New numbers would be added in London, where a rejiggered show opened in 2018 at the Other Palace Theater, before a transfer to the West End. A member of the producing team at the time, a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber, had notes.
“He said, ‘Act 2 really needs a big statement for Veronica,’” O’Keefe recalled, adding that Lloyd Webber invoked his own “Memory” and “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” as examples. The result was “I Say No,” which was eventually folded into the show along with the songs “You’re Welcome” and “Never Shut Up Again.”
As it had in the United States, “Heathers” drew notable young performers, including Carrie Hope Fletcher as Veronica. It was Fletcher’s presence that lured Izzy Chapman, a 13-year-old fan, but it was the musical itself that made her a Corn Nut.
“I had a really hard time at school, and it was the first time I felt fully seen in a show,” Chapman, now 19, said in a video interview. “I felt safe, it was just pure joy.” She added, “Everyone can relate to someone in ‘Heathers.’ No matter who you are, you can see either your past self or your current self within those characters.” She has now seen the musical 110 times, created handmade replicas of all the costumes, and will travel to New York to see the current cast on July 11 (the 7-Eleven chain plays a big part in the “Heathers” mythology).
While the show has evolved, so have the times, which have caught up to Waters’s caustic take on high school as a theater of cruelty. The movie’s plotlines may have seemed exaggerated in 1989, but they anticipated the emergence of social media as a vehicle for spreading rumors, and the depiction a young gunman in a duster preceded the rise of school shootings.
“I was just in high school five years ago and it is absolutely like this,” Likes said. “Did my school blow up? No, I was lucky. But did people act like this? Absolutely.”
Instead of pushing these portrayals into operatic mayhem, as the film did, the musical chooses to embrace a different kind of subversion, which may explain its theatrical success. Murphy recently recalled Waters’s early response to the show: “Dan said what really impressed him was the fact that we took the zeitgeist of our time, and the counterpunch was to surprise people by having the characters hug at the end,” Murphy said, referring to Waters.
“The subversive move now,” O’Keefe piped in, “is to stand for something and to care about things.”
The post The ‘Heathers’ Musical Is Back, With a Little Less Darkness appeared first on New York Times.
