Heathers: The Musical

Heathers: The Musical
The 2010 black comedy musical, Heathers, was written by Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy and was an adaptation of the 1988 film by Daniel Waters. The musical follows Veronica Sawyer as she navigates through Westerberg High School while dealing with being on the bottom of the social hierarchy and attempting to gain an in to the most popular clique: The Heathers. The musical deals with the social issues of navigating through social acceptance, teen suicide, as well as gun violence.
The musical opens to the written song, Beautiful, in where Veronica sings about how the teenagers she’s currently in schooling with were once a single unit, there wasn’t a bully to be found and they all were happy in each other’s company. It

While the characters in the movie don’t necessarily kill themselves, but instead are killed by James “J.D.” Dean, it still offers a prospective of teen suicide by suicide notes that could actually describe what those teens were going through or teens that may possibly be going through the same thing. In Heather Chandler’s suicide note, which was forged by Veronica, it discusses how Heather C. “felt” about her life, how “no one thinks a pretty girl has feelings, no one gets her insecurity.” (61) Seeing as how the dead Heather Chandler is the one singing these lines it’s possible that this is how the teenager actually felt and believed she needed to cover these feelings in the persona of a mean girl; these lyrics take in the struggle previously discussed of social acceptance. If Heather hadn’t donned the persona it was possible that she would be put on the bottom of the social ring and might have actually taken her own life like Martha Dunnstock did from lack of social acceptance and bullying. Another teen suicide spotted is that of both Kurt Kelly and Ram Sweeney, who’s “suicide” is left to look like that of two gay lovers who could no longer handle bearing the persona of rough masculinity they had to put on in an effort to hide their “love” from everyone. Their death brings about both their fathers admitting that they were once in a relationship and marks a change in the town of Westerberg as the two become martyrs for homophobia. The deaths, while tragic, seem to be opening the floor for a discussion to begin in the high school and while at some points it’s used for petty reasons like appearing on the news as a successful counselor, in the case of Ms. Fleming, or attempting to appear on MTV, like Heather Duke, it allows students to discover what they feel about the situation and how they’re not truly alone in