In the musical, she never fires the gun.) While film-Veronica is so fascinating precisely because of that ambiguity – high on the power Heather Chandler’s death gives her, as well as on the erotic thrill of her anarchic existence with JD, she represses her awareness of JD’s nefarious intent until it’s too late – musical-Veronica is telegraphed so strongly as a Good Girl Led Astray she constantly tries to confess the murders, attempts suicide in order to expiate her guilt and is, in a particularly sexist change from the film, a virgin until she meets JD. (In the film, she kills at least one of the “meathead jocks” with a gun she’s been told is filled with harmless tranquilizers it’s ambiguous whether or not she believes it. In this iteration of Heathers, she’s so blinded by her love of JD that she blindly follows his orders she cannot be held at least remotely responsible for any of the murders committed. The change, it seems, is designed to make Veronica more relatable, but it only serves to make her come across as a blithering idiot, one who in the course of three songs goes from wannabe to popular girl to defiant outcast. (Her peers, meanwhile, don’t seem all that bad – they yell John Hughes-style stereotypes in the hallway during the opening number, but seem quite happy attending the popular kids’ homecoming party and making out with each other two songs later). When we meet her, she is not Winona Ryder’s jaded, sarcastic Veronica of the film – granted nominal popularity by the Heathers, gritting her teeth through every second of it but unable to face the possibility of life without their favour – but a perky ingénue, desperately wishing for popularity and ecstatic to find the Heathers granting it. While the very rough outline of the plot is there – boy meets girl, boy gets girl to accidentally kill her best friend, boy and girl embark on a killing spree – the musical suffers from an inexplicable reluctance to ever have our heroine, Veronica, do anything that might remotely affect her squeaky-clean likeability. The denatured Heathers: The Musical is more Heathers: High School Musical than the nihilistic classic on which it is based. It’s not, in other words, a story that could be told in the post-Columbine era.Īnd, judging from the performance of Heathers: The Musical I saw last Friday at New World Stages, it hasn’t been. In the war for popularity, nobody emerges unscathed. High school – as any teenage viewer of Heathers well knows – operates on the principles of dog-eat-dog. By the time JD and Veronica – by this point broken up over the former’s murderous methods – are grappling with a bomb in the school’s boiler room, their argument over whether or not to blow up the school is all the more chilling because, as disturbing as JD’s methods are, he does have a point. The popular Heathers (Heather Duke, Chandler and Macnamara, for the uninitiated) may not kill off their lower-status classmates, but you get the feeling that, if given the opportunity and alibi, they too just might. Erring on the side of deadpan rather than camp, the Heathers film succeeds because of its willingness to entertain – however briefly – the idea that Veronica and J.D. The Breakfast Club meets Lord of the Flies, Heathers is the bleakly satirical story of two Ohio teenagers, amped up on hormones and slushees, who – accidentally at first, then with intent – start offing their popular classmates, framing their murders as suicides and giving the school’s “Sexist Beer Guzzling-Jock-Assholes” hidden depths. Lifeboat heathers movie#Photo courtesy of Branded Pictures Entertainment.Ī few months ago, while watching for the tenth or eleventh time the 1989 black comedy classic Heathers, I became conscious of how difficult – even impossible – it would be to make that movie today. Heathers: The Musical at New World Stages, an Off-Broadway theatre near New York’s Times Square.
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