Now in its second year, Sydney’s Hayes Theatre is proving itself an incubator of first-rate boutique musical theatre. Like Sweet Charity, Blood Brothers and Little Shop of Horrors before it, Heathers: the Musical began in the 110-seat venue before touring interstate. This show, which chafes against the sincerity of the musical theatre art form, has returned to Sydney to play in our most prestigious venue: the Sydney Opera House.
Based on the 1988 cult classic film, Heathers: the Musical – written and composed by Laurence O’Keefe, who created the surprisingly great Legally Blonde the Musical and Kevin Murphy, who worked on Reefer Madness – is darker than your average musical. Veronica (Hilary Cole), a wry and witty outcast whose best friend Martha (Lauren McKenna) is the butt of most teenage bullying, falls in with the popular girls: queen bee Heather Chandler (Lucy Maunder), and Heather McNamara (Rebecca Hetherington) and Heather Duke (Hannah Fredericksen), who truckle to Chandler’s every demand.
This is all laid out during the effective opening number, Beautiful, where we learn that all Veronica wants is for the cutthroat aspect of high school to disappear. She’s looking for genuine respect, friendship, and connection – but once she is absorbed into the Heathers, everything just gets worse. She ends up in the middle of a mess of murder, suicide and adolescent teenage politics, and her new boyfriend, mysterious and truculent trenchcoat-wearing JD (Stephen Madsen), is right there at its core.
It’s unsettling to see a modern musical so embrace the loose moral concerns around rape and sexual assault that ran through high school movies and books from the 1980s – nearly every woman onstage is on the receiving end of unwanted sexual contact. But perhaps one of the stronger features of this production is that the occasions where this would be played for laughs are minimal.
Even in the truly regrettable number Blue – where Kurt (Jakob Ambrose) and Ram (Vincent Hooper), the creepy, bone-headed duo from the football team, lament the state of their testicles after being denied sex – our protagonist Veronica looks deeply disturbed. Her values are the show’s values.
But as Heathers delves deeper into suicide, murder and other deeply personal and deeply sensitive topics, it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. In moments, it’s happy being a black comedy; in others, it’s a well-meaning attempt to connect with teenage isolation. This floundering causes a weakness in the show that stops it from being truly great, but it has moments of wonderful expression that are only ever really possible in musical theatre – snatches of lyrics, here and there, that strike a chord of authentic experience.
Those moments seem to come largely from the actors playing Veronica and JD, the fraught and fucked-up lovers who are fighting their own battle between good and evil. Cole, a rising star in Australian musical theatre, is a gifted singer (the pop-rock score calls for tenderness, a strong belt and serious bite, and Cole makes it seem effortless), but she’s a remarkable actor too. With Madsen’s generous partnering as the ultimate troubled youth they forge a believably complex relationship, perhaps adding more complexity and probing to the show than the source material. How to deal with first love and terror and the act of becoming an adult? “Our love is God,” JD avows, after killing two people. With that kind of trauma and promise, what else is there to do?
Maunder’s Heather Chandler falls on the other side of the coin: she is the epitome of camp. Her hair is higher than everyone else’s, she has the most fun with her mean commentary, she’s the least human character – more a drag caricature – and her coldness is a scream. It’s a perfect role for Maunder, whose clarion tone is malleable and rings so delightfully with menace here.
Also of note in the exceptional cast is McKenna, who plays the dual roles (not usually combined) of Martha Dunstock, school laughing stock and sweetheart, and Ms Fleming, an ex-hippie (“That did not work out well for me,” she admits of the free love movement), who tries to work through the children’s pain amid the burden of suicide. McKenna won the 2015 Sydney Theatre award for best newcomer in the role, and almost a year on her performance has become even more sympathetic (Martha) and hilarious (Fleming). Hers is a rare kind of character work, and a disarming stage presence.
The idea to turn Heathers into a musical came from the movie’s screenwriter, Daniel Waters, and the off-Broadway production’s director, Andy Fickman, but Heathers: the Musical seems to have found its ultimate directorial match in Trevor Ashley. Ashley is an actor and drag artist (he recently played Monsieur Thénardier in the Australian tour of Les Miserables, and his Liza Minelli act has been as far as London’s West End), and he has a great sense of both black comedy and camp.
His production is economical and indulgent alternately. There are minimal set pieces (designed by Emma Vine) and props, but there is plenty of pomp, circumstance and sequins. In fact it’s almost like a rock concert (although the sound design needs refining – its high volume led to a loss of clarity for both the music and lyrics on opening night), with brisk, intelligent, and unchallenging staging. Iconic lines from the film are given their appropriate due for those in the audience ready for them, and there’s a knowingness to this production, enhanced by Cameron Mitchell’s witty choreography, that brings the show up from “lazy nostalgia production” to “daring dark comedy”.
For a musical with an identity crisis and too much bombast, it’s wildly enjoyable and bursting with future musical theatre stars. This production of Heathers: the Musical is clever, daring, and just as damaged as its characters. It’s a little irresistible.
• Heathers: the Musical runs at the Sydney Opera House until 26 June
