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If you're familiar with the original 1988 film and you're wondering how this could be the case, your confusion is understandable. That movie, which helped propel Winona Ryder, Shannen Doherty, and Christian Slater into the Hollywood big time, was a brutal and brutally funny examination of the power of high school conformity, and showed how cliques and their unique kind of psychological warfare could push good teens over the edge. Part of what set it apart, though, was an underlying (satirical) sympathy for all the aggressors, viewing the popular girls (the trio of same-named tormentors of the title), the jocks (Ram and Kurt), and the kids who push back (Veronica, a Heather-in-all-but-name, and her black-trenchcoated loaner boyfriend, J.D.) alike as victims of a system that predates them and is still perpetuated by indifferent adults with their own agendas. For their musical, writers Kevin Murphy and Laurence O'Keefe have retained the basic concept but elbowed it even deeper into musical comedy territory. With their work amplified by choreographer Marguerite Derricks and director Andy Fickman, any shred of edge is gone, transforming a bitter-tasting but thought-provoking amusement into a Hairspray-lacquered Technicolor extravaganza so achingly desperate to entertain rather than inform that it fails to do either.
This evaporates the moment we encounter the Heathers, who proceed through a tunnel of cafeteria trays into adolescent stardom: the leader Chandler (Jessica Keenan Wynn), the quieter McNamara (Elle McLemore), and the scheming bulimic Duke (Alice Lee, in the Doherty role), all of whom are plastic impersonations of the cruel girls who run the school by form-fitting fiat. With their plastered smiles, bulging eyes, and too-sharp dance moves, they don't present a real obstacle, but the book and songs insist and we go along, until Veronica meets J.D. (Ryan McCartan), the two murder their first popular Heather (Chandler), and the race to the bottom is on. There's more, of course, but Ram and Duke (next in Veronica and J.D.'s sights) are so over the top (their big song, "Blue," is a jaunty toe-tapper about, um, unfulfilled sexual arousal), and Lee so cartoonish in depicting Duke, complete with a face-scrunching sneer that appears as if on auto-pilot, that any threat vanishes the moment it pops up its head. And when Veronica and J.D.'s victims reappear as ghosts, for no other obvious reason than to provide vocal backup and eye candy (costume designer Amy Clark has the men strutting around in briefs, though Wynn is confined to only a kimono), it's impossible to take seriously any of what you're watching. O'Keefe and Murphy unquestionably have talent; the former was behind Bat Boy and the latter Reefer Madness, noteworthy titles from the beginning of the last decade. And some of what's here (the creepy Act I finale "Our Love Is God," the oddly rollicking "Seventeen") works within the framework that's been established. But "Blue" is an overextended but undercooked joke, "My Dead Gay Son" (for two fathers, well played by Anthony Crivello and Daniel Cooney) more of a political statement than a necessary component of the show, and "Shine a Light" (for a straining Michelle Duffy as a hippy teacher) flat-out unnecessary, and many of the character numbers ("Lifeboat" for McNamara, "Kindergarten Boyfriend" for Martha) feel tentative, as though O'Keefe and Murphy weren't sure which direction was the right one. Except for McCartan, who picks up Slater's mantle without losing a beat and draws a smart and restrained J.D., all the performances bear the same characteristics, just to different degrees (Lee goes too far at every juncture, the second-most-successful Weed only some of the time), as do Derricks's hard-driving-pop-video is-this-parody-or-not dances. This suggests Fickman's hand is at fault: He's staged the show well enough on Timothy R. Mackabee's uninspiring unit set and with Jason Lyons's fine lighting, but it's as if every element wants only to shriek at you shrilly to laugh laugh laugh. And when something tries that hard to convince you it's funny, it pretty much just convinces you it isn't. Without that undercurrent of believable humor, everything comes across as mean-spirited and tone-deaf rather than instructional, not at all advocating the anti-heroes' crimes but not successfully condemning them, either. The film showed that real problems, taken to great extremes, become ludicrous—the rash of school shootings in the decades since its release only reinforces its message. Without real people at its core, however, to remind us of the cost such antics can exact, Heathers becomes every bit as one-dimensional as the fingerpolish-loving, croquet-playing, binging-purging demons it ostensibly decries.
Heathers
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