“Fuck Me Gently With A Chainsaw”: Should We Keep Pillaging Pop Culture For The Stage?

Heathers, the 1988 cult high school black comedy that turned Winona Ryder into a star and brought about an unexpected revival of croquet, is back in a new set of shoulder pads. The film’s been adapted into a stage musical that is now playing at Melbourne’s Arts Centre after runs around the country over the past year.

As a night out goes, Heathers: The Musical is a brightly-coloured piece of nostalgia with the fizz and pop that’s necessary for the younger demographic it seeks to attract (many of which arrived in costume; red scrunchies out in force). And, coming on the heels of musical adaptations of Silence of the Lambs, Carrie, The Evil Dead, and most recently American Psycho (which even has its own fake blood “splash zone”), a stage version of a work of cinema horror isn’t as far-fetched as it may have initially felt.

But while these winking musical takes on iconic genre titles are becoming more common, nostalgia alone cannot sustain a show or a movie or, in this case, a musical. Like an increasing amount of musical theatre in general, Heathers: The Musical has firmly planted its existence on the fondness a generation has for the original property. In this case, it’s doubtful those who aren’t disciples to the alter of Heathers will get what all the fuss is about.

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How Very — From Screen To Stage

The heavily stylised look and quotable dialogue make it easy to understand why somebody would think of adapting Heathers. Everyone has their favourite lines and all of the famous ones are in there for knowing audience appreciation. But the show, like many of these film-to-stage adaptations, is almost detrimentally too faithful to the original text, fearful of leaving out too much.

The songs in Heathers: The Musical are for the most part perfectly fine, if all too frequently out of step musically with the darker material that made the original movie stand out so much. (The fact it arrived in a sea of John Hughes movies and romance trifles like Lover Boy made this all the more apparent). In case you have forgotten, Heathers is about a newly popular girl, Veronica, whose rebellious boyfriend begins killing her mean friends and disguising it as suicide. If Heather Chandler found out her life had been turned into a cheerfully scored musical she’d roll in her grave and gag (even if bulimia is so 1987).

Perhaps most importantly, the fashions of costume designer Angela White are a treat and are as deliciously over-the-top as should be expected. The costumes featured in the film are cultishly famous for their plaids, pastels, florals, and pre-goth aesthetics as well as those famous shoulder-pads.

There are particular stand-out songs too: the suicide letter set to music in ‘The Me Inside of Me’, mean girl anthem ‘Candy Store’, the ode to teenage innocence ‘Seventeen’, and ‘Dead Girl Walking’ about the demise of Veronica’s popularity. One of the big changes, however, is the ending and it’s incongruous to the first two hours. They could have sat around and sung ‘Kumbaya’ with more authenticity.

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The Power Of Brand Name Musicals

It’s no secret that it’s getting harder and harder to produce entertainment that doesn’t already have brand recognition. This is why Marvel now have over a dozen inter-connected movies and several television shows, why DC are desperately trying to do the same, and why a glance at the last decade’s end-of-year box-office hits shows only a few titles that aren’t sequels, remakes, or reboots. It’s why television shows from the past like Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Arrested Development are all being reborn.

This is no different on stage. The last decade of Tony Award nominees for Best Musical include The Color Purple, The Wedding Singer, Grey Gardens, Cry-Baby, Xanadu, Billy Elliot, Shrek, Catch Me If You Can, Once, Newsies, Bring It On, A Christmas Story, Aladdin, An American in Paris, School of Rock, and Waitress. There are, of course, other musicals based on King Kong, Ghost, An Officer and a Gentleman, Strictly Ballroom, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, The Little Mermaid, 9 to 5, Legally Blonde, and The Addams Family that have attempted to mimic those Tony hits to less success.

This isn’t even a new phenomenon. The stage has always taken influence from a variety of places. And given how unsuccessful theatre producers have been with sequels — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies, anyone? — it isn’t unsurprising that they’ve turned to famous properties like these in escalating numbers to save their $100-per-ticket skins.

It’s just that these days, more and more, the titles being offered up feel like shameless pandering to pop culture’s insistence on nostalgia rather than new readings of classic works like The Color Purple (which will finally receive its Australian premiere later this year, 11 years after first premiering on Broadway to huge success). And while smaller and independent theatres are thriving with great local content, including those inspired by other texts — a recent non-musical stage take on Picnic at Hanging Rock was a masterful hit — many of these adapted musical efforts lack a certain quality that will have people remembering them as long or as fondly as the originals.

Sure, not every new show can be The Book of Mormon, Hamilton, or Fun Home, but local audiences deserve better than An Officer and a Gentleman, which flopped in its Australian world premiere and never made it to Broadway or Ghost, about which one reviewer suggested: “You know you’re in trouble when, on opening night, a not insignificant number of freeloaders wander away at interval”.

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Coming Soon: Virgins Who Can’t Drive

A Clueless musical is latest of these nostalgic adaptations to be announced, but will it just be another trip down memory lane? It’s set to be a jukebox musical — the term given a stage show or film that uses pre-existing songs rather than originals — so unfortunately we won’t get any songs about Calvin Kline mini-skirts, burnt cookie dough, and, maybe something called ‘I Totally Paused’ about being a virgin who can’t drive. It seems inevitable that Mean Girls will make the leap soon enough. Second act highlights could include ‘I’m a Cool Mom!’ and ‘You Go, Glen Coco’ (it already rhymes!).

If local theatre producers want to get in on the trend, then why not turn to something like Looking for Alibrandi, which has a mix of teen romance and culture clash that would make it a perfect fit for the stage. Likewise, Puberty Blues, which has a sexual frankness to it that a talented lyricist could have a field day with while also embracing the ‘80s trend. Outside of the teen film realm, why The Sapphires (which began its life as a 2004 work with Melbourne Theatre Company) hasn’t yet utilised the popularity of the jukebox musical is a mystery.

For now, if you’re the kind to know your Heather Dukes from your Heather McNamaras, secretly wishes somebody would ask you out in a 7-Eleven, and quotes “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” to this day, then Heathers: The Musical will be hard to resist. But for a show about suicide, bullying, and teenage mayhem that ends with shootings and a bomb exploding on school grounds, it doesn’t have half the bite of the original.

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Heathers: The Musical will be on at The Art Centre in Melbourne until May 22.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much at @glenndunks.