The Corn Nuts are out in force.
About a three-minute walk from Buckingham Palace, the Other Palace Theatre is the splendid, current home of Heathers: The Musical. (The rowdy show will roll into the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin on April 25th.)
On a Thursday afternoon, the Corn Nuts – an affectionate term for the production’s hardcore fans – have come dressed as their favourite Heather and armed with multicoloured scrunchies. This writer has never seen so many ecstatic teenagers at a theatrical production.
Attendees swap tales from the front lines; the family to my left has come from France; the woman to my right is bringing her teenage son and daughter for the fourth time in 2023.
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“We had no idea,” says the show’s director Andy Fickman. “When we got to London in 2017, when Paul Taylor Mills, a brilliant producer, brought us in, we didn’t know if anyone in London or UK knew Heathers, the original movie. or if they cared about the late ‘80s in America or if they would watch something set in a small town in Midwest Ohio. And then it sold out overnight. The show has this life in UK and Ireland that we could never have dreamed of before.”
Fickman is the veteran Hollywood director of She’s the Man, The Game Plan, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. As a theatre director, he originated Jewtopia, Reefer Madness: The Musical, and Heathers: The Musical.
The latter is based on the evergreen 1988 teen comedy. That film starred Winona Ryder as a disgruntled member of the cool clique, who, with the aid of her new boyfriend JD (Christian Slater), begins killing the popular kids.
In 2009, Laurence O’Keefe, who co-wrote the score for the Legally Blonde stage musical, worked with Kevin Murphy (Reefer Madness) on a musical adaptation, which reuses many lines from Daniel Waters’s tart, ambitious screenplay.
Speaking to this newspaper in 2018 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Heathers, Daniel Waters revealed that he had written the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick.
“I was given a gift from Dan when we first started, which was a copy of his original screenplay, which was over 300 pages,” laughs Fickman. “Most screenplays are about 120 pages max. This was like the War and Peace of screenplays. I loved diving into that. And I love how the film has progressed over the years and how these new fans have discovered it and how they email or talk to us at the theatre. I think great art leads to communication. And over the years, a lot of people have opened up about bullying. Everybody tells me, they’re either a Martha or a Veronica.”
[ Heathers: 30 years on – how the dark teen comedy predicted everythingOpens in new window ]
Unsurprisingly, the musical carries a trigger-warning: “This production contains haze, loud noises including gunshots, flashing lights and strobe, strong language and mature themes including murder, suicide, sexual violence and references to eating disorders. Audience discretion is advised.” The production makes merry with the dark humour of its source material. Cast members include: “Beleaguered Geek” and “Drama Club Drama Queen”. The much-quoted line “I love my dead gay son” is now a cheery LGBTQ anthem. Refashioning the material for greater comic or musical effects is an ongoing process.
“We ended up adding three new songs in London,” says Fickman. “I’m such a fan of musicals. If you name a musical, I think of 10 songs from that musical. That’s the heart and soul of what a musical is. Will people sing this song as they leave the theatre? By the time we started this new production, we added Veronica singing I Say No, which is probably one of my favourite songs in the show.
“Heather Duke finally has a great number, Never Shut Up. We said goodbye to Kurt and Ram’s song, Blue, and added a new song, You’re Welcome. It was better storytelling and it’s a banger of a song. We were at our original run at the Other Palace in London and we were rehearsing the new song during the day with Carrie Hope Fletcher, who was brilliant. And we kept debating. What do we tell the audience? We decided not to tell anybody. We were all standing at the back of the theatre waiting and all of a sudden the first notes of the music starts up. And we can see all the Corn Nuts looking at each other as Carrie sings the song. There was an immediate standing ovation. When we closed on New York, that was not on my bingo card.”
Heathers had acquired a following on this side of the Atlantic long before it transferred to the West End. But it never made it to Broadway. Its popularity was powered along by viral culture and contraband
The evolution of the Corn Nut is an interesting trajectory. The fan base is self-named after the last word bully girl Heather Chandler says and is probably the last food that she eats.
In common with Hamilton, which produced a cast album that sold 169,000 copies in 2015, and a further 739,000 copies in 2016, Heathers had acquired a following on this side of the Atlantic long before it transferred to the West End. But unlike Lin-Manuel Miranda’s monstrously successful production, Heathers never made it to Broadway. Its popularity was powered along by viral culture and contraband.
Remember bootlegs? An oddity in the post-streaming landscape, the bootleg’s historical standouts – say Prince’s Black Album or Aphex Twin’s Caustic Window – can currently be found lying around the internet.
And yet, occasionally, a bootleg happens along that threatens to mimic the impact of Bob Dylan’s New York Sessions: Blood of the Tracks or Mac Miller’s Balloonerism. Heathers: The Musical was just that. But on TikTok.
In 2020, the #Heather hashtag alone garnered about 600 million views on TikTok, with many TikToks using snatches from the original cast recordings of Heathers: The Musical. Then came the “Martha Dumptruck in the Flesh” lip-sync/singing challenge.
Writing in Studies in Musical Theatre in 2021, Dr Trevor Boffone identified Heathers as part of a new wave of “stealth musicals”, that proliferate on TikTok in ways that are “completely removed from the show’s dramaturgy; Heathers: The Musical did not just go viral but stayed viral on TikTok [and] became canonical pieces of Gen Z culture”.
The show, in turn, reaches out to the Corn Nuts through social media platforms. The annual #HalloweenHeathers fancy dress contest, where the accounts repost fan photos of their Heathers-themed costumes, has inspired a micro-industry of cosplay replicas and Etsy sales. Various choreography workshops and ask-the-cast events have welcomed Corn Nuts into the theatres where Heathers: The Musical is performed.
“We were seeing an interaction with the crowd a little bit in LA,” says Fickman. “And by the time we got to New York, we were seeing more and more young people dressing up. But in London we saw that every day. We have a moment in our show where the teacher Ms Fleming finds her “Steve” in the audience. And that’s become a touchstone thing. As a Richard O’Brien fanatic, I go crazy every time I see that scene. It warms my heart to have just a little of that Rocky Horror Picture Show magic. Our Corn Nuts are part of the energy of the show.”
There have been amazing actors who I hope to work with that just weren’t right for Heathers. During the last round of auditions, we had over 500 people audition
— Andy Fickman
The original London cast included Hannah Lowther, the former “Tesco TikTokker” who amassed 22 million likes by combining her retail job with musical theatre. Last year, Lowther made history as the first actor to play all three Heathers: Heather Chandler, Heather Duke and Heather MacNamara. The incoming Heathers tour features Jacob Fowler, the winner of BBC One’s Little Mix: The Search and subsequent support act Little Mix on their final UK arena tour. (To date, he has some 135.9 million views on TikTok.)
“It’s always almost ridiculous to say you’re looking for that X-factor but you are looking for that X-factor,” says Fickman. “There have been amazing actors who I hope to work with that just weren’t right for Heathers. During the last round of auditions, we had over 500 people audition. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But the 19 that we cast spoke for themselves. And the next 19. I feel we’ve done due diligence.”
He laughs: “And I just love having all these people singing for me every day.”
Heathers: The Musical is at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from April 25th to May 6th
