Heathers (musical)
| Heathers: The Musical | |
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Off-Broadway Poster
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| Music | |
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| Book |
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| Basis | 1988 film Heathers |
| Productions | 2010 New York Concert 2013 Hollywood 2014 Off-Broadway 2015 San Francisco 2015 St. Louis 2015 Sydney 2017 Off West End |
Heathers: The Musical is a rock musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Laurence O'Keefe and Kevin Murphy and based on the 1988 cult film Heathers. After a sold-out Los Angeles tryout, the show had a production Off-Broadway in 2014. The show, while a comedy, deals with issues of teen suicide, murder, bullying, homophobia, and gun violence. It has since become massively popular on various social media outlets.
It is the first day of school, 1989, and seventeen-year-old Veronica Sawyer is frustrated with the hellish competitive social hierarchy at Westerburg High School, where nerds and underclassmen are pushed around by brutish, idiot jocks like Ram Sweeney and Kurt Kelly. After trying to defend her best friend, the cheerful, overweight Martha Dunnstock (cruelly renamed "Martha Dumptruck" by the uncreative Kurt), Veronica longs for the days of elementary school when life was simple and everyone was friends. She wishes desperately to be above the drama, but there is only one elite clique who can do that: the Heathers, the three most beautiful, most popular girls in school. They are the weak-willed head cheerleader Heather McNamara; the bulimic, personality-lacking yearbook committee head Heather Duke; and the "mythic bitch queen" of the school, Heather Chandler. When Veronica uses her talents as a forger to get the Heathers out of detention, Chandler recognizes her potential and gives her a make-over, elevating her to a member of their inner circle ("Beautiful").
Veronica soon realizes that popularity is a double-edged sword when Heather Chandler discovers that Martha has had a crush on Ram Sweeney since he kissed her in kindergarten. She orders Veronica to forge a romantic note from him and give it to Martha. Veronica tries to stop them but backs down when the Heathers threaten to destroy her social life ("Candy Store"). Their threats are witnessed by a mysterious, trenchcoat-wearing, Baudelaire-quoting new kid, Jason "J.D." Dean, who criticizes Veronica for betraying her friend in exchange for popularity. Ram and Kurt take the opportunity to pick a fight with him, and he unexpectedly fights back and defeats them. Watching the fight, Veronica finds herself attracted to the stranger ("Fight for Me"). At Veronica's house, Chandler ridicules her for being into someone below her social status and subtly insults her parents, who aren't sure they like their daughter's new friends ("Candy Store Playoff").
Veronica meets J.D. again in a 7-Eleven on her way to Ram's homecoming party. They hit it off, and he flirtatiously extols the virtues of the Slurpee, explaining he uses the brain-freeze to numb the pain of his troubled relationship with his father, the absence of his dead mother, and his nomadic lifestyle ("Freeze Your Brain").
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