“Heathers: The Musical” at New World Stages (Photo: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

In the eleven years since Heathers: The Musical last ran at New World Stages, its audience, and the times, have changed. The original production leaned more into its source material’s pitch black, nihilistic comedy, depicting a string of murders-staged-as-suicides at an Ohio high school with the grim knowingness of the 1988 film. 

Now, the musical plays more like a cautionary tale than a bared-teeth satire. Girls, avoid toxic boyfriends! Well, yes. Killing your classmates is not a good idea. Understood! Andy Fickman’s production and the softening revisions Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe have made to the book and score add up to a tepid, if tuneful adaptation of what was once a controversial, giddily violent send-up of teen culture.

But are the teens even like that anymore? There’s a gulf between the film’s version of high school from 1988 and the musical’s, first in New York in 2014. The musical, then, was pitched at a generation of elder Millennials who could relate to Heathers’ depiction of high school: pre-cell phone, pre-internet, where it really mattered who you sat with at lunch. In the intervening decade, the musical’s cast album has been claimed by Gen Z, decidedly the opposite of that life experience. 

This surge in popularity is on display at New World Stages, where the audience is largely composed of young people under the legal drinking age, many dressed in the Heathers’ colorful blazers. They are screaming and stamping their feet from the second the score kicks in and the lights go down. The first appearance of the Heathers is like The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. This musical is clearly, thrillingly important to this generation. So what if it’s kind of missing the point?

By providing extensive backstory for almost every character, the musical spells it all out too cleanly. It removes all culpability from Veronica; her diary entries are anodyne and she stands up for herself much earlier than she does in the film. The jocks bully the weaker kids because their own dads bully them. The parasocial relationship J.D. has with his father in the film is here neglectful, abusive, and traumatic, explaining his own violent impulses. We don’t need to know everything in black and white to get the message. 

To their credit, but to the detriment of drama, Gen Z likes everything to be moralistic. The jaded Gen X-to-Millennial pipeline has been dammed and there’s a push for a cleaner world, both in the environment and on the stage. Casey Likes’ scary-sexy J.D. is appealing to Lorna Courtney’s Veronica, but she can also see right through him. In a new song, “I Say No”, Veronica shuts him down in no uncertain terms: “You need help I can’t provide. / I’m not qualified. / This troubled teen / Is getting clean.” This is not the Veronica from the movie, this is a Veronica for a new time.

Courtney and Likes have sizzling chemistry and the house erupts when she enters his bedroom at the end of “Dead Girl Walking.” They want her to get some, even knowing that it will drag her into a dark place. Both actors rip into the score, singing the tunes with ferocity and, particularly with Likes, an intense attention to the lyrics and subtext, even if the songs are a little more surface-level than the depth he’s giving them.

McKenzie Kurtz slays as Heather Chandler, bringing a sparkling, irresistible nastiness. Erin Morton, as Martha Dunstock, is the show’s emotional heart. Morton opts to underplay every moment, but in such a big, loud, exaggerated world, that stillness jumps out.

The unit set by David Shields requires a lot of rolling and unfolding flats from the ensemble, but the results, aside from the 7-Eleven, don’t create a very appealing mise-en-scène. The clunky arrangement of walls adds little to the delineation of place and often looks sloppy. Ben Cracknell’s lighting, though, makes up for it with exciting shifts of color and tone, particularly when he spotlights the exact shade of each Heather’s blazer.

It’s very clear from the raucous reception around me that even if I felt old and disconnected from the group, the musical was clearly working. We need things that excite a younger generation and get them to the theatre. Have fun, kids.