Heathers The Musical – in cinemas on 28 March 2023.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
TW: One reference to suicide & SA.
Heathers is complicated: it’s a film of a show of a film. I’m one of those people who thinks virtually every show deserves a pro-shot recording, but when reviewing: are we talking about the quality of what’s being represented or how well it’s being represented?
Given the prohibitive expense of live performance, a film adaptation or pro-shot is the only fully staged version of a show the average person gets. For Heathers, which has lived most of its life in the hearts and computers of its fans (it had its time as an unrivalled cult hit almost exclusively online), an even greater proportion of the audience can only ever see the show in this format.
Well, starting at the end, how well is it represented? Overall: very well indeed. The shots are crisp, bright and beautiful; the singers’ syllables are crystal clear but they do not compete with the instrumentals, instead working in the kind of collaboration you get when you’re there for real.
A really obsessive viewer might notice a bent towards over-edited cinematography; once too often a slightly over-used close-up sacrifices a wider view, which risks being disorientating. This, however, is largely a matter of taste, depending on where on the scale of authentic ‘audience POV single fixed camera’ to immersive ‘multi-shot Hollywood movie’ you want your recording to be.
Anyone reading this who isn’t a ticket-owning Heathers fan presumably wants to know whether the show is worth the two hours and the price of admission. In all honesty, that’s hard to say – and especially hard without some spoilers, so beware.
The 1989 non-musical film Heathers is tonal madness: it attempts to be both a Hughesian high school dramedy and crime thriller. While the show does, sometimes successfully, play with the tension between these personalities (the morbid jokes are some of its highlights – see: “my prom date blew u-… blew me off”), it can’t escape its inability to resolve the two halves it has inherited. It therefore becomes difficult to invest in the narrative when it will move from a pretty earnest analysis of teen depression and suicide to an attempted rape scene that concludes with a Karate Kid joke and a funny rhyme about manure.
There are a whole slew of shows which, if summarised on paper, sound ludicrous. Sometimes, this belies greatness: ‘rap-theatre fusion about the life of America’s first Treasury Secretary’ ought to be dead on arrival, but somehow it just works. In other instances – say, for example, ‘annual feline dance competition to decide who gets to die (based on the poetry of T.S. Eliot)’ – the summary is just as Frankensteinian and uncomfortable as the final product.
Heathers is nowhere near Cats-crazy, but it’s certainly not for everyone either. Existing fans are in for the time of their lives with a well-produced, perfectly performed version of their beloved show, back from the dead and at a fraction of the cost. If you’re not convinced that Mean Girls with added ‘murder’ would be your cup of tea (or anti-freeze, as is used to bump off one high schooler) this might not be for you.
Tom Martland
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