Theatre in Review: Heathers (New World Stages)According to our modern playwrights, high school is a living hell; abandon all hope ye who enter there. Musicals such as Mean Girls, The Prom, and Dear Evan Hansen depict life in grades nine through 12 as a maze of humiliations and microaggressions. Plays like John Proctor is the Villain and Trophy Boys feature gaggles of anxious adolescents who freak out on cue, screaming away their inner conflicts. And let's not forget The Outsiders, who are too busy attending rumbles and hiding out from the cops to attend classes. It's a jungle, I tell you. Then there's Heathers, based on the 1988 cult film, in which the students are lucky to get home alive. "This ain't no high school/This is the Thunderdome," sings heroine Veronica, in an opening number. It's called "Beautiful," a title that pushes irony to the limit since the kids at Westerberg High School are majors in cruelty, hurling epithets like "freak," "slut," and "poser" in every direction. Veronica, hoping to make it to graduation unscathed, allies herself with the title characters, a trio of social dictators in pleated plaid miniskirts. These big-haired queen bees consider their fellow students as so many peasants, but Veronica's forgery skills prove useful -- you never know when you'll need a hall pass - thus securing her a coveted seat at their lunch table. It can't last, however, and not just because Veronica isn't comfortable with being part of the snooty, insular in-crowd. (She is especially unhappy when goaded into playing a nasty trick on her friend Martha, a good-natured, plus-size social outcast.) When Veronica takes up with Jason Dean, aka JD, a black-clad, Baudelaire-reading iconoclast who caustically dismisses the school's caste system, the center cannot hold. Following a major disaster at a booze-fueled party -- nobody gets away with vomiting on Chandler, the number one Heather -- Veronica ends up an accessory to murder, thanks to JD's deft handling of a Drano cocktail. Such activities prove addictive: With one Heather down, JD takes out Kurt and Ram, obnoxious jocks with a taste for date rape. With a casual killer for a boyfriend, Veronica doesn't know where to turn. Wait until she finds out his plans for the rest of the student body. The film of Heathers flopped in its initial release, but persisted on video, giving young fans expressions like "What is your damage?" Heathers, the musical, had a modest run Off Broadway in 2014 but never fully went away, thanks to a series of mountings in the UK. This production, based on a UK/Ireland tour and featuring a few revisions from the Off-Broadway original, leaves one wondering if the property hasn't outlived itself. For all its so-called darkness, the film was conceived in a simpler time, when the idea of high school homicide still seemed amusingly outrageous. I'm old enough to remember when Julie Brown had a novelty hit with "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun." But that was many massacres ago; these days, the smart homecoming queen has an eye on all available exits, in case the team mascot is packing an AK-47. What once may have seemed acidly satiric now feels sour and slightly behind the times. This may explain why Heathers (book, music, and lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O'Keefe) often seems trapped between satire that leaves a scar and standard-issue high school musical tropes. The stabs at black comedy, most of them taken from the film, are labored and old-hat: JD arranges the bodies of Kurt and Ram to suggest a love suicide, cueing a memorial service duet, "My Dead Gay Son," sung by the boys' fathers, who -- wait for it -- share a secret love. To quote one of the Heathers, "It's so '87." A show that aims for heartless hilarity is overly prone to putting its conscience on display in numbers like "I Say No," as if we need to be reminded that murder is bad. The Martha subplot is a total drag, an anti-bullying PSA inserted into the action in a failed bid for emotional engagement. This production, staged by Andy Fickman, at least showcases the rising stars Lorna Courtney (Veronica) and Casey Likes (JD). Each is a magnetic, big-voiced presence with a knack for sly humor, but, unlike Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, who created the roles on film, these technically gifted musical theatre performers lack the idiosyncratic personalities that might give their relationship a potent, nasty kick. As Heather Chandler, who refuses to shut up even unto death, McKenzie Kurtz best captures the snarky, comically petulant tone that is the show's oxygen. (Coming back from the dead to confront the uproar caused by her passing, she boasts, "I made the trains run on time.") Elizabeth Teeter amuses as the most airheaded Heather (which is saying something), but Olivia Hardy, as the chief pretender to the Heather throne, suffers in comparison, being largely unintelligible in her big number. Then again, this may be partly due to Dan Samson's assaultive sound design. That always-welcome pro Kerry Butler shows up as an aging hippie on the faculty ("My senior thesis at Berkeley was on the subject of pediatric psychotherapeutic musicology"), effortlessly stopping the show with a transparently false and self-serving inspirational number, "Shine a Light." David Shields' set, a brick high school interior that quickly converts to several other locations, is at least efficient. The costumes, by Shields and Siena Zoe Allen, guarantee that every pleated skirt and scrunchy is in place. (I know JD's black trench coat is a nod to the film, but it unpleasantly calls to mind Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers.) Ben Cracknell's hyperactive lighting design could do with many fewer chases and saturated colors. The choreography by Stephanie Klemons and Gary Lloyd isn't too memorable, but this isn't a show that demands much in the way of dance. The score has its occasional successes: "Freeze Your Brain" effectively establishes JD as an eccentric with a tragic past and a hint of danger. "Seventeen" is an attractive tune that introduces a genuine note of regretful longing from a crime-weary Veronica. But too many songs are bent on stating the obvious. The dialogue is spiked with lines about "the lip gloss gestapo" and "scarfing down a hot bowl of chaos" that are more adolescent than amusing. Whatever is disappointing about Heathers may not matter to an audience hooked on memories of the film. At the performance I attended, a line from the screenplay, about intercourse with a chainsaw, got a hand that rivaled the response of any musical number. And, based on their entrance applause, Courtney and Likes are well-remembered from their previous gigs in & Juliet and Back to the Future respectively. But if you fall outside these interest groups, Heathers will likely have all the hallmarks of yet another musical retread. Those girls should check their makeup; they're looking awfully tired. --David Barbour 
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