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Heathers: The Musical is a musical with music, lyrics and book by Laurence O'Keefe and Kevin Murphy, based on the 1989 film of the same name written by Daniel Waters. Like the source material, the protagonist is Veronica Sawyer, a young woman who quickly becomes an unhappy member of Westerberg's High's most powerful clique, the Heathers (so named because the other three members share the same first name). And then a jacket wearing transfer student, Jason Dean, or 'J.D.' enters Veronica's life and stands up to the duo of bullying jocks by fighting with them in the cafeteria. Next thing she knows, Veronica is teaming up with J.D. to get revenge on those who've wronged her, resulting in an accidental death. And as more bodies are added to the count, Veronica realizes J.D. is a seriously disturbed psychopath with ambitions tied into his nihilistic views of human behavior.
The musical's plot closely follows the original, with some minor revisions. Where the original movie joins Veronica when she's already with the Heathers, the musical's opening number ('Beautiful') shows us how she joined with them in the first place. Though there is less gunplay, much of the dark comedy and discussions of sensitive topics such as bullying, peer pressure, homophobia, fat shaming, sexual assault, psychological abuse, suicide, self-harm, and manipulation remain intact.
The show ran Off-Broadway in the mid-2010s, and has had a successful run in London's West End. A 'proshoot' of the West End musical has aired on the Roku Channel in the U.S. and been released on DVD in some markets.
- Adults Are Useless: True to the original, none of the adults in the show are of any help in solving any of the problems whatsoever. The parents and the school staff are oblivious to what's really going on, the Hippie Teacher wants to exploit the deaths for group bonding rituals, and the police are incompetent. Lampshaded by a ghostly Heather C. when Veronica realizes Ms. Fleming and the other adults are not going to be of any help, and she will have to clean up the mess herself.
- Alpha Bitch: Heather Chandler, at the start. Later Heather Duke takes the role.
- BSOD Song: Heather McNamara's "Lifeboat", in the second act
- Composite Character: The Martha Dunnstock of the musical is a composite of the movie's Martha Dunnstock and Betty Finn.
- Dark Reprise: "Dead Girl Walking" has an even more ominous reprise late in the second act as Veronica heads to the boiler room to stop J.D., knowing she might not make it out alive. "Our Love Is God" might also qualify: Its second half becomes a dark reprise of its first half.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Some changes have been made to better serve the medium and streamline the story. The college party is replaced by a party thrown by the jocks Kurt and Ram, the scene where J.D. scares the jocks in the cafeteria with a gun firing blanks is replaced with a choreographed fight scene, and the dream sequence where Veronica dreams J.D. uses underlined passages from Moby Dick to fake a suicide for Heather Duke is completely omitted (since none of it really happened, and it didn't really tell us anything about the characters and their motives/goals that we didn't already know).
- Villain Love Song: "Our Love is God"
- Villain Recruitment Song: "Candy Store" is all about Heather Chandler pressuring Veronica to abandon "loser" friends like Martha in favor of their clique.
- Villain Song: Heather Chandler and the Heathers with "Candy Store". Heather Duke with "Never Shut Up Again", and J.D. with "I Was Meant to Be Yours"