Stage shows, movies and exhibitions
The hit off-broadway musical struts into Melbourne this month.
We are getting used to the darkening of our musicals, but even fans of Sweeney Todd might shudder at the prospect of a musical adaptation of cult 1988 teen flick Heathers. It does, after all, deal with extreme bullying, murder dressed as suicide and weapons in schools. Lucy Maunder, who plays the bitchiest Heather in the yard, agrees that it isn’t the sunniest of concepts. “Anyone who’s coming for a lighthearted comedy will probably be alarmed,” she tells Time Out in full shoulder-padded glory as Heather Chandler. “It treads a very fine line between hysterical and really offensive.”
Heathers is about a clique of popular girls all named Heather who are undone, and sometimes casually murdered, by a fellow student and her psychopathic boyfriend. Maunder is too young to have been influenced by the blackly satirical Winona Ryder/ Christian Slater film, although it could be argued that Clueless and Mean Girls – two films she loved while growing up – wouldn’t exist without it. What she is familiar with is the particular cruelty of schoolgirls.
“I went to an all-girls high school. You remember these people you were so scared of, and looking back on it they’re so much bigger in your head, and probably way worse than they actually were.”
It’s true we tend to exaggerate the horrors of our childhood, but Maunder’s recollections still sound pretty shocking. “There was a girl who made one of her minions do her homework every day and paid her in tuna sandwiches. Once in home economics, she took the minion’s brownies out of a tupperware container, ate them all, and replaced them with dirt.”
It’s precisely this kind of black-hearted cunning that Maunder gets to channel as “the epitome of vileness” that is Heather number one. Part of the appeal of the musical is the way it pushes these real-life bullies into the extremes of representation, into outright camp. Which makes Trevor Ashley, Australia’s greatest exponent of camp since Bob Downe, the perfect choice to direct. “He’s absolutely in his element with this show. He understands comedy so well in his performing life, so he gets those beats. He knows what’s funny.”
Maunder comes off a stint in the ’50s-set Ladies in Black, and finds the costume in this show just as helpful. “These shoulder pads are so wide it’s hard to stand in them and not feel like the queen bitch.” Her relish is almost scary.
Arts Centre Melbourne 100 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne 3004. 1300 182 183. www. artscentremelbourne.com.au/ whats-on/2016/musicals/ heathers-the-musical. Various times. $74-$104. May 11-22.
“It’s hard not to feel like a queen bitch in these shoulder pads”