At the heart of high-school musical, Heathers, beneath its teenage angst and soaring score by co-writers Kevin Murphy and Legally Blonde’s Laurence O’Keefe — not to mention the terrific lead performances by Carrie Hope Fletcher and Jamie Muscato — there is an icy sliver of a bad idea. Even so, the comedy and drama skilfully brought out by Andy Flickman’s direction makes us laugh one minute and feel compassion the next.
After successful runs in Los Angeles and New York and a tryout at Lloyd Webber’s musical nursery The Other Palace, the show arrives in the West End buoyed by positive buzz. Middle-aged fans of the 1988 cult movie on which it is based can sit among a new teenage following and think that they have something in common. Because who hasn’t experienced the growing pains of being a teenager, and the insecurity and fear caused by school bullying?
Our heroine is geeky Veronica (Winona Ryder in the movie) played here by the immensely likeable Carrie Hope Fletcher. In a bid to become popular, Veronica befriends the three feared and lusted-after Heathers, a tyrannical trio who lord it over their fellow students with the cruelty of a medieval monarch. “The lipstick Gestapo,” Veronica calls them. Enter mysterious new boy JD (Christian Slater in the movie, but here played by the excellent Jamie Muscato), a well read “Baudelaire-quoting badass” who is too-cool-for-school.
“I didn’t catch your name,” says Victoria after he beats the hell out of two bullying school jocks. “I didn’t throw it,” says JD, a reply so laid back it slays Veronica on the spot. The whirlwind romance is consummated with power singing, most of it by Veronica. Having joined and then withdrawn from the Heathers’ plan to publicly humiliate her oldest friend, Veronica seeks solace in virginity-losing sex and one of the very few musical numbers sung not before or after intercourse, but during.
They make a lovely couple. Compared to their peers who can’t eat a cheese sandwich without over emoting, Veronica and JD are an oasis of well adjusted sophistication. JD lends Veronica all the emotional support she needs, or perhaps more than she needs when he kills anyone who makes her cry. And it is here where that bad idea emerges.
In 1988, when the movie was released, multiple murder in American schools was not the thing it is today. It was a decade before Columbine. So as the body count in this show climbs, real-life high-school massacres begin to haunt this show much like the victims here who shadow Veronica like a bad conscience. And so the uneasy sense is that Heathers, The Musical is not so much exploiting real high-school atrocities as ignoring them. You wonder if the film could be made now, let alone a musical.
Still, there are some terrific performances, and one or two great songs such as Seventeen, a stirring, yearning hymn to the idea of being a normal teen. Despite the disturbingly casual way its lead characters deal with death and suicide, there is an empathy for the tormented condition of being an insecure teenager here. And that just about steers the show away from being in worst possible taste.
SIX
Arts Theatre
★★★★✩
More a song-cycle than a musical, this witty Edinburgh fringe hit will hopefully launch the careers of its creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Their big idea is to resurrect the six wives of Henry VIII and give them the chance to step out from their ex’s ample shadow.
It’s all done to a hip-hop and soft-rock score that at times has shades of Hamilton. “Remember us from your GCSEs,” asks Catherine of Aragon. Well, you would if history lessons were all like this.
