An uproarious, bad taste satire of high school life
The 1989 film flunked at the box office, but Heathers became a cult hit on the rental market. A vision of a toxically competitive American high-school filtered through the lens of black comedy, it proliferated on the sly, like samizdat literature – watched at teen sleepovers.
Stiletto-sharp and bluntly unsentimental, it gave rise to muchquoted lines and slang. But it was the slant of Daniel Waters’ script that gave it legs. It encapsulated the palpitating heart of adolescent confusion.
Just how were we supposed to react to the oddball Romeo and Juliet meets Macbeth storyline? Social climber Veronica (Winona Ryder) forms a fatal attraction to charismatic misfit JD (Christian Slater). Initially they exact vengeance on the ghastly Heathers (a clique of croquet-playing frenemies, all named Heather) she has joined in a bid to fit in. But JD’S insane goal is to wipe out Westerburg High and pass the massacre off as a suicide pact, idiotically assumed by the authorities to be in vogue (thanks to his machinations). Were we to laugh or recoil in disgust? The beauty of this musical adaptation from the States (tweaked in London during a sell-out run this summer at The Other Palace) by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’keefe is that it matches the original’s ability to discombobulate.
It can’t offer close-ups on impassive faces or attain the sustained deadpan of the film. But what it does do – using the lever-switching power of song – is send you on a psychological roller-coaster, lurching between sincerity and insincerity, triviality and profundity, challenging you to gag or guffaw at the rebellious bad taste of it all.
Witness the audacious number that Murphy and O’keefe plant in the mouth of Jodie Steele’s Heather Mcnamara – the glowering leader of the Heathers pack – shortly after she has succumbed to a poisoned hang-over cure. Scribbling a suicide note to cover up her demise, Carrie Hope Fletcher’s Veronica and Jamie Muscato’s JD accord her sentiments of wounded sensitivity she never expressed in life. “I am more than shoulder-pads and make-up / No one sees the me inside of me,” the girl’s ghost croons, skipping about the stage in a state of macabre rejuvenation and rapture. It’s funny, peculiar, trenchant.
Ditto the uproarious anthem My Dead Gay Son, unleashed when the fathers of two knuckle-dragging hunks (murdered and mischievously mis-identified as closet gays by JD) abruptly out themselves. Daft yet it adds emotional depth.
Not everything is of a similar leftfield sophistication but overall the show displays the kind of fastidious attention to detail the Heathers apply to their colour coordinated uniforms. Crucially, in Fletcher and Muscato, it boasts leads with as much chemistry as the Hollywood originals.
Muscato manages to be as coldly sinister as a corpse and as hot as a smoking Colt pistol, causing Veronica to swoon during slow motion fisticuffs and memorably singing a number in praise of brain-numbing slushies. Fletcher breaks through into the big time here: tuneful, thoughtful, tilting between cattiness and compassion, morality and devil-may care. Up there with Hamilton? No, that’s the point. It’s down with the kids in those daunting corridors of power, where incrowd favour hangs on a look, a word. We’ve all been there.
Until Nov 24. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; trh.co.uk