Reviews

Review: Heathers the Musical Predicted America’s Social Disintegration

Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s dark musical comedy returns for an off-Broadway revival.

Zachary Stewart

Zachary Stewart

| Off-Broadway |

July 10, 2025

0357 McKenzie Kurtz (Heather Chandler), Lorna Courtney (Veronica Sawyer), Elizabeth Teeter (Heather McNamara) and Olivia Hardy (Heather Duke) in Heathers The Musical. ©Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
McKenzie Kurtz, Lorna Courtney, Elizabeth Teeter, and Olivia Hardy star in Heathers the Musical, directed by Andy Fickman, at New World Stages.
(© Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

No show has shaken my confidence in my ability to accurately assess new musicals more than Heathers, Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s stage adaptation of Daniel Waters’s 1988 dark comedy starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. I was dismissive about the initial off-Broadway run in 2014, and have since come to regret that review. Of course, the musical has also undergone significant revisions since then—but still, I was wrong.

The excellent revival now playing at New World Stages reinforces my belief that I was too hasty in my judgment of Heathers, a musical that absolutely anticipated the loop of opportunism and cynicism that has led to so much social breakdown over the last decade. A cautionary fable from Gen X to Gen Z, Heathers is the great musical of our nihilistic age, when so many people look at the world as it is and want to burn it down.

It takes place in the repressive hellscape that is high school in suburban Ohio. Heather Duke (Olivia Hardy), Heather McNamara (Elizabeth Teeter), and queen bee Heather Chandler (McKenzie Kurtz) rule over Westerberg High, commanding the love and (more importantly) fear of all students—from the lowly Martha Dunnstock (Erin L. Morton) to football stars Kurt Kelly (Cade Ostermeyer) and Ram Sweeney (Xavier McKinnon). If Veronica Sawyer (Lorna Courtney) can ingratiate herself to these mob bosses in miniskirts, she figures, she has a better chance of surviving until college.

But the arrival of a trenchcoated stranger named J.D. (Casey Likes) makes Veronica reconsider her precarious position in this social hierarchy. Why exactly does Heather Chandler wield so much power? Wouldn’t it benefit everyone to overthrow her—permanently? Armed with a drain cleaner-laced hangover cure and the careless confidence that comes with infatuation, Veronica disrupts the fragile ecosystem of Westerberg by taking out the apex predator. And it’s still not enough to satisfy J.D.’s lust for annihilation.

Casey Likes plays J.D. in Heathers the Musical, directed by Andy Fickman, at New World Stages.
(© Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

Likes is magnetic as the teenage philosopher-arsonist whose only mooring to society is 7-Eleven, the Slurpee a sacramental libation inducing a pleasant numbness in lieu of salvation. “We can start and finish wars. / We’re what killed the dinosaurs. / We’re the asteroid that’s overdue,” he croons like the lead singer of a school-shooter-themed boy band. He is the attractive face of devastation—a sweet smile and vacant eyes under a mop of curly hair.

As portrayed by Courtney, Veronica is no mindless fan girl: Intelligent, ambitious, and with a killer set of pipes, she’s going places. If she can fall under J.D.’s sway, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Under the direction of Andy Fickman (who helmed the 2014 production), the supporting players create a believable microcosm of American society. McKinnon and Ostermeyer radiate jock energy as Ram and Kurt (we’re never entirely convinced that their gay love in a fabrication). Morton’s gentle sincerity as Martha is genuinely touching and reminds us that the world would fall apart without true believers like her. And Kerry Butler is hilarious as Ms. Fleming, the hippie teacher who leverages a string of apparent suicides at Westerberg to feed her own narcissism. Her song “Shine a Light” is a pointed satire of boomer woo with lyrics like, “I have struggled with despair, / I joined a cult, chopped off my hair, / I chant, I pray, but God’s not there.”

That’s typical of Murphy and O’Keefe’s brilliant lyrics, which can only be fully appreciated through repeat listens. Their music, which pillages postwar American pop, makes an irresistible setting for these disturbing ideas. I particularly enjoyed the radio-ready anthem “Our Love Is God,” which closes the first act with a terrifying crescendo.

Lorna Courtney plays Veronica Sawyer in Heathers the Musical, directed by Andy Fickman, at New World Stages.
(© Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

We can hear every clever orchestration (by O’Keefe and Ben Green) and lyric thanks to sound designer Dan Samson, who manages to conjure that rarest of miracles in contemporary musical theater: perfect sound balance.

The other design elements are just as polished: David Shields’s versatile multilevel set captures the cinderblock drear of an Ohio high school, while his costumes (co-designed with Siena Zoë Allen) tell us so much about each character before they ever open their mouths to sing. Ben Cracknell’s lighting proves essential to the storytelling, with flashes of red rage bursting through the upstage windows. Gary Lloyd’s choreography (with additional contributions by Stephanie Klemons) keeps the show moving at a feverish clip with moves that seem to have burst forth from retro-’80s MTV.

But the most memorable aspect of this revival is Kurtz’s commanding performance as Heather Chandler. Born to rule, she captivates Westerberg with her majesty, as all queens must. She can sing the house down, but her true voice really comes through after her death, when she reappears as Veronica’s unlikely conscience. “This is their big secret,” she says, smug satisfaction dripping from every syllable as we watch Ms. Fleming’s PR stunt go up in flames, “The adults are powerless.”

What emerges (and what most surprised me about my return trip to Heathers) is a stealthy and persuasive conservatism. Sure, Heather was a tyrant, but was her reign worse than the chaotic power vacuum that followed? It’s a question destined to be asked with mounting stridency as we gaze upon the national bonfire into which we seem determined to cast our rulers, norms, and institutions.

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