High school satires don’t run much darker or more delicious than the 1988 film Heathers, which complicated its Mean Girls social dynamics with murder and suicide. As the heroine, Veronica Sawyer, mordantly observes: “My teenage angst bullshit has a body count.”
Now at New World Stages, composer-lyricists Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe have adapted Daniel Waters’ screenplay into a new musical, amplifying its cheerful vulgarity while softening its social critique, replacing black comedy with candy-colored camp.
They made Heathers into a musical? That sounds like a singularly bad idea, or at least one that suggests a distinct misunderstanding of either (a) the movie, (b) the demands of musical theater or © both of the above.