Heathers: The Musical Off-Broadway Reviews

This production tries to hide its rough edges and half-hearted staging with a callow appeal to nostalgia for something that isn’t even very old yet. (The show has a teen edition available for licensing at high schools, which helps explain why so many young people in the audience know the lyrics.) But the portrait of bloody popularity politics within Heathers is what makes the story cling to you, and it’s less clearly reckoned with in this production.

Beyond its sociological themes, Heathers is a ton of stylish, well-crafted fun with top-notch acting and top-to-bottom earworms. After intermission, the score grows darker and introspective, giving individual characters moments to unburden their hearts... Neat thing about Heathers: it may appear to be coldhearted and ice-blooded, but by the end, there’s a thaw and everyone is part of the club.

In the musical, the ensemble’s close-out joyfulness is more uniting, and Duke is cajoled into accepting Veronica’s friendship. It doesn’t feel like the right ending for Heathers, but it is absolutely the right ending for this musical adaptation—and for those fans whose whooping for the cast emerging from New World Stages’ stage door at the end of the show echoes long and loud down 50th Street.

The big-belting Courtney may not nail Veronica’s sarcasm, but she sounds great in her numbers, especially the wistful "Seventeen.” And Likes's J.D. is a revelation. Best known for playing fresh-faced teens in Broadway’s Almost Famous and Back to the Future, he may have seemed an odd choice for this sinister role. But he manages to make J.D. both crush- and cringe-worthy, sympathetic but ultimately scary. When he woos her with "Our Love Is God," you get why Veronica's smitten, but you also root for her, in the end, to fight back against the seductions of violence. In a new cultural landscape in which cruelty is often the point, the mere idea of choosing kindness over killing makes this Heathers’s message feel radical.

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, boy, when Heathers takes flight, it punches a hole through the roof. ‘Candy Store’ still grooves as a catchy paean to cruelty, and ‘The Me Inside of Me’ is ingeniously ironic... These two ballads herald a final 30 minutes ratcheting to a nail-biting climax.

At the end of the day, Heathers is Big Fun and boy, are folks loving it. Having now gone twice since their return last month, both audiences were so rabid with screams and cheers for both iconic lines and even more iconic riffs, sometimes it was hard to hear the music. It knows what it is, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Anyway, the myriad reasons to see (and hear!) Heathers are small in number, whereas the myriad reasons not to see (and hear!) it—unless you’re a Corn Nut—are much larger.

Having lost the courage of its own outrageousness, ‘Heathers the Musical’ feels too toothless for the Trump era, even as it maintains a level of tastelessness that I might call amoral, if that didn’t make me sound too much like a ‘Reefer Madness’-era scold. Let’s just say the show feels too tonally jarring and too calculated for me to sign up for membership in the Corn Nuts.

Heathers 2.0 isn’t so much a reimagining as a high-polish paint job. But this is no “Greased Lightning.” While Grease depicted late-50s nostalgia and the kind of gang warfare that didn’t escalate much beyond chewing gum on the underside of a desk, Heathers‘ Gen X timestamp goes for the jugular, with a triple homicide, fat jokes, fag jokes, a potential date rape and an attempted suicide. Meanwhile, an audience dotted with Gen Zers dressed like the three popular Heathers (a powerhouse trifecta of McKenzie Kurtz, Olivia Hardy, and Elizabeth Teeter), squealed at decibel-shattering levels, equally mesmerized by Lorna Courtney (& Juliet) as Veronica and Casey Likes (Back to the Future) as J.D.

For all its mock brutality, in fact, this “Heathers” left me nostalgic for a more innocent time, before contemporary developments such as social media had expanded, exponentially, the ways in which people could be cruel to one another — and inexperienced, malleable young people in particular could be damaged by that cruelty. Happily, you needn’t consider any of this to enjoy the mischievous fun that “Heathers The Musical” provides.

Dark times demand a dark musical and with its sociopathic leading man, a body count of snuffed out high schoolers, plus the lure of suicide as a leitmotif. Heathers: The Musical certainly delivers the heebie-jeebies. But, like an anxious teen from a broken home, the jam-packed staging tries extra hard to please. The book and score by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe wants to be earnest as much as it wants to be twisted, wishes to be empowering as much as it wishes to be bleak. The result, under the breakneck direction of Andy Fickman, is that there is something for everyone, but little that feels sincere. Thankfully, a powerhouse sextet of women are on hand, blissfully belting their way through the madness, in a captivating show of strength.

What’s your damage? After a Monday evening performance of the Off-Broadway musical “Heathers,” now at New World Stages under Andy Fickman’s clever direction, I was afraid my damage was shattered eardrums from the excessive shouting by an audience who seemed to think they were watching a Taylor Swift concert. Somehow, this offbeat show – based on a quirky 1989 movie about a high school run by a trio of bullying girls and previously seen Off-Broadway in 2014 (and then revised for numerous runs in London) – has become a cult-like phenomenon. Which leads to the question: Is there something to shout about? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

Fickman’s familiarity with the material really pays off, because the production has a polish that belies its Off Broadway setting. He laces scenes with wonderful moments in the margins too, as when Ostermeyer’s dim-bulb quarterback has to be prompted to make an exit or when Teeter’s cheerleader Heather delivers a series of defiant high kicks upstage as a wall closes and casts her into darkness. (The choreography is by Gary Lloyd.) The cast also hits the perfect notes to blend believability with exaggerated cartoonishness demanded of any sendup of high school social dynamics

If you are unfamiliar with the tale, I'll leave it to you to learn the rest. And I urge you to do so, because the plot unfolds in such an engaging way, and the performances by the 17-member cast are so uniformly strong, that this production of Heathers promises to be the hit of the summer and beyond.

When the first version of Heathers the Musical premiered in 2014, its overly grody comedy seemed to me out of step with that era of “hope and change.” But this new, much improved production is right on time. In our “cruelty is the point” age, it’s unexpectedly cathartic to see battle-scarred asshole teenagers live to flip off another day.

Despite the heavy themes, Heathers is an incredibly enjoyable performance, due in large part to the clear commitment of this cast and creative team to allowing the show to speak for itself. Heathers’s truth is powerful and engaging, and the experience of seeing it is an absolute delight. I laughed, I cried, and, most importantly, I listened.

Heathers: The Musical isn't just a clever interpretation of the 1989 black comedy Heathers. This stage show is a rock show, thanks to a gutsy revival production and an audience bursting to experience it.

To the question of whether Heathers, initially released as a film in 1989 and presented as a musical in 2014 can still work with audiences again in 2025, the answer is yes. It’s all about getting off on the right foot, which Fickman and company admirably achieve. From the moment the first lyrics are delivered, more shouted than sung (“Freak! Slut! Burn-Out! Bug-Eyes! Poser! Hard Ass!”), you’re in for a bit of time travel that’s well worth the trip.

Overall, “Heathers: The Musical” is lighthearted, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining. This dark comedy is witty and heartfelt as it raises awareness on such serious topics bullying, school violence, peer pressure, and suicidal ideation. Anybody who has ever been in high school, in love, or in trouble can relate to its theme. Aside from being a cohesive group effort, each of the main actors is given their own musical number, which gives them the chance to shine individually. The fight scenes were well-choreographed as well, and the musical score is stirring and resonant. At this show, the audience was loud and passionate; moreover, it’s the feel-good escapism we all need, especially in these trying times that the world is going through. This uplifting Off-Broadway musical garners four out of five stars.

Sharper, sleeker, and eerily timely, the revival proves that what began as a cult curiosity has grown into one of the best stage musicals of the last decade. Eleven years ago, “Heathers” premiered at New World Stages and was met with skepticism and a short-lived run. But in the years that followed, it built a rabid cult following thanks to its original Off-Broadway cast album, a hugely successful West End production (which yielded its own cast recording), and a professionally filmed version of the London staging. Combined with the viral spread of its songs on social media, “Heathers” became a genuine phenomenon among younger audiences raised on TikTok and YouTube bootlegs.

Name-calling, bullying, cliques, and cafeteria caste systems have always been part of teen life—and Heathers doesn’t flinch, nor does it apologize. And no trigger warnings in the pre-show announcement either. Instead, as the audience and characters experience the two-hours and twenty minutes of laughter in the darkest corners of adolescence, Veronica’s journey reminds us that acceptance isn’t about being popular—it’s about being seen, being kind. And in a world of curated identities and online validation, that’s a message that lands. If the screaming teens in the audience are any sign, Heathers is still speaking loud and clear.