Heathers The Musical

Heathers is not the story it used to be. Heathers The Musical, a stage adaptation of the 1988 film, has more in common with family romps Grease and Hairspray than the edgy quality the film provided at the time of its release.

It's a mistake to assume then that the play would continue in the movie’s vein and perhaps aspire to present a dark and dangerous piece of contemporary theatre in the manner of Hedwig & The Angry Inch and Urinetown musicals.

So the first thing to remember when attending Heathers The Musical is not to just expect Heathers + songs. 

The original Daniel Waters-penned film nearly didn’t become the pop culture touchstone that is in Australia today. After its box office failure in the States, the Australian distributors were planning to throw it into multiplexes for a one-week run ahead of its VHS release with a generic straight-to-video-style title (Lethal Attraction - as it was released in Germany). But a local independent cinema group saw potential and helped begin the film’s transition into a major cult phenomenon.

So Heathers can’t help but arrive on stage with audience preconceptions. It’s only been treading the boards in its new guise since 2010, including a limited run in Sydney last year.

Heathers (the film) was a subversive and savage comedic statement about peer pressure and teen suicide. It had its high school protagonists bumping off the school bullies and making their deaths look like suicides. Its climax involved a plan to wipe out an entire school’s population. It was kinda nasty. 

Heathers also changed teen comedies. Pre-Heathers, teen comedies were usually either gross-outs (Porky’s anyone?) or, y'know, were made by John Hughes (or made to look like a John Hughes film). Without Heathers it’s doubtful we would have gotten to Dazed & Confused or Mean Girls.

But we aren’t here for a history lesson. We are here to consider this new creation that is Heathers The Musical. 

This latest production, helmed by Trevor Ashley and starring Hilary Cole (Veronica) and Stephen Madsen (JD) in the roles made notorious by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, is some sort of fun. It’s just not Big Fun (ahem, that’s a reference to a key musical element of the original film that has oddly been excised from the play yet is paid homage to as a song title for a drunken party scene).

The cast and crew do an impressive job with a property that is not quite what it maybe thinks it is. The atmosphere on stage is breezy - jokes land, songs are performed masterfully, the boisterous choreography helps keep the action moving along at a snappy pace and the costumes are totally on-point ’80s (those garish colours and over-sized shoulders translate perfectly to the stage - no one’s disappearing into the background).

It’s the songs and the dialogue that threaten the show’s momentum. The show’s writers Kevin Murphy and Lawrence O’Keefe know how to subvert theatre - they collaborated on the stage adaptation of Reefer Madness and cult hit Bat Boy The Musical. While there are hints of that here - Kindergarten Boyfriend lovingly reminisces about pulling scabs off, another song Freeze Your Brain is inspired by convenience store frozen drinks - it’s mostly filled out with overwrought ballads and those romping show tunes you feel you’ve heard a dozen times before. Act Two’s opener My Dead Gay Son borders on high camp as it totally undoes the original film’s very un-Hollywood (at the time) commentary on gay stereotypes (Heathers arrived not long after activist historian Vitto Russo’s The Celluloid Closet eviscerated the movie industry for its perpetuation of gay stereotypes - Heathers poked fun at the belief that gay people could be identified by such signifiers as a love of Joan Crawford, mascara and mineral water). While the song’s lyrics hint at the movie’s intent, the number ends with two hetero-identifying male characters partaking in juvenile gay sex innuendo.

Music was integral to the movie’s story and offered an out-of-left-field selection (both Syd Straw and Sly & The Family Stone supplied versions of Que Sera, Sera and the movie’s fictional band Big Fun’s music was provided by REM producers Don Dixon and Mitch Easter) with a haunting score composed by David Newman. To not acknowledge such rich musical sources is ignoring an integral piece of the spirit of Heathers.

The musical’s plot also amps up the role of Heather Chandler, the leader of the mean girl school clique, who makes Veronica’s life such hell. She haunts Act 2 (SPOILER) from beyond the dead. Her returned spirit was a small movie plot point but perhaps the nature of a stage production means that you can’t have one of the main cast sitting around backstage twiddling their thumbs for half the play. Heather's dominating presence dilutes the horror that our heroes actually KILLED A SCHOOLGIRL. It then just gets plain confusing when other dead characters start popping up ad hoc as ghost versions of themselves in some of the later chorus routines.

Given how they have chosen to tinker with the original, it is a strain to watch how hard the writers then strive to retain the film’s much-quoted, fan-favourite dialogue. Not only has “I love my dead gay son” given rise to the aforementioned song and dance number, but lines such as “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw”, “Why are you pulling my dick?” and “What is your damage” are so heavily telegraphed that the words now seem out of context. Maybe the writers wanted to make sure the audience didn't miss this collection of 'greatest hits'.  However, other familiar dialogue does blend in - Cole owns the diary narration classic “My teen angst bullshit now has a body count” just as much as Ryder once did.

The opening night audience squealed with delight for the famous Heatherisms and there was full-bodied whooping for Lauren McKenna’s turn as the guidance counsellor and her gospel-inspired Shine A Light. And, at the end of this show that almost turns dark outsider teen characters into the kids of Glee, plenty of the audience were on their feet for a rousing ovation.

Heathers The Musical plays at Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne until May 22. In Sydney it will play at the Opera House from June 8 until June 22.