By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Friday 24 May 2024, runs through 6 July 2024 and then tours the UK RUNTIME: 150 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

‘What’s your damage, Heather?’ The moment we realise we’re not the target audience for this musical of an 80s cult film is when we start to see young women dressed in different coloured blazers as if part of the terrifying clique of bullies called Heather at its heart.

• Read on for reasons including how to see this production in London and across the UK

There’s also a cheer that we don’t understand or share that goes up throughout the venue as Heathers McNamara, Duke and Chandler arrive onstage for the 1st time in an iconic pose like a darker, sassier and more destructive Charlie’s Angels.

Heathers: The Musical has had an extraordinary life in the UK but bowed 1st in the US in 2013 in Los Angeles and then a year later off-Broadway spawning an original cast album that was thought key to its success here.

Its composer Laurence O’Keefe had enjoyed international success with Legally Blonde: The Musical, also a straight film before its theatrical musical incarnation, which won 3 Olivier Awards in 2011 for its UK version which starred Sheridan Smith (Opening Night, Gielgud Theatre).

Winona Ryder stars in the film as 17-year-old Veronica Sawyer who despairs of the social heirarchy of Westerburg High School in Ohio where she lives in fear of the Heathers but also wants their approval and runs scared of the dim-witted jocks who flock around them.

Things start to get interesting when the mysterious JD, played by Christian Slater (Glengarry Glen Ross, Playhouse Theatre) in the film, arrives and ‘mythic bitch’ Heather Chandler appears to commit suicide.

We 1st saw this musical at The Other Palace in 2018 starring Carrie Hope Fletcher saying: ‘For those unfamiliar with the original, darkly comic source material it was way ahead of its time and its themes of school bullying and pupils with guns are arguably more to the forefront of minds now than they were when the film starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater was released.’

In 2021 we caught it at the Theatre Royal Haymarket starring Christina Bennington before it returned to The Other Palace and embarked on 2 UK tours with a 3rd set for after this run saying: ‘This production’s fine supporting cast gets some of the best material and we particularly enjoyed Kurt and Ram’s fathers’ side-splitting yet beautiful response to their sons’ apparent suicide in My Dead Gay Son.’

Go see this because of its faithfulness to its awesome origins but also for its fantastic score which contains some hilarious Heather re-invention in The Me Inside Of Me and misguided feelgood vibes in Shine A Light.

Its cast has changed considerably over the 6 years this production has been running successfully in incarnations in the West End and regionally but it’s an absolute winning formula and we think you’ll find it irresistible.

The regional tour begins after this run at an in-the-round venue where this is the 1st production not to be realised that way, disappointingly, and stops off at Windsor, Bath, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Perth, Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Chester, Aberdeen, Sheffield, Richmond, Stockton, Oxford, Blackpool, Torquay and Cambridge in November 2024. How very.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Nimax Theatres Tickets
• Have you seen a Heathers before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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