The Rich Girls Are Going to Lose, for Once

Are there any souls out there brave enough to admit they were popular in high school? O.K., maybe Gov. Chris Christie, but that wasn’t a good career move.

The teenage kings and queens of the prom, the homecoming and the keg party — the golden boys and girls who taunt and belittle the smart and sensitive — have become first-choice villains in contemporary pop culture. They’re the winners we love to hate, and one of the last minority groups (along with their parents, the 1 percent) that it’s acceptable to mock savagely.

The latest entertainment to capitalize on this satisfying loathing is “Heathers,” the rowdy guilty-pleasure musical that opened at New World Stages on Monday night. This is a show that turns an Ohio senior class in-crowd into a lineup of piñatas, waiting to be busted open. And when I say busted open, I am not speaking metaphorically.

Written by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe, “Heathers” is based on Daniel Waters’s screenplay for the 1988 Michael Lehmann movie, which died at the box office but has had a flourishing afterlife in cult heaven. Starring a young, untarnished Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, “Heathers” was the bold template for later, more successful films like “Mean Girls,” not to mention cherished misfit television series like “Freaks and Geeks.”

Mr. Lehmann’s film, which presented its leading heartthrob as an exterminating angel specializing in bratty rich kids, was also blacker and more daring than its successors could afford to be. Since the original release of “Heathers,” the United States has experienced the Columbine massacre and much consciousness-raising about adolescent bullying and suicides.

This means — and how strange is this? — that “Heathers: The Musical” is nostalgic for a more innocent time, when a plot about killing off high school royalty wasn’t quite so sick a sick joke. This show also evokes a pre-”Hunger Games” era when fantasies about teenage revenge could be smaller and didn’t have to involve apocalyptic maneuvers. In a way, this latest incarnation of “Heathers” is to the 1980s what “Grease” was to the 1950s (when it was first staged in the 1970s). Directed by Andy Fickman and featuring a buoyant, cartoonlike cast, this “Heathers” isn’t as savvy or mordant as the film that inspired it.

But in scaling up the movie’s grotesqueness — which is inevitable when you set dark material to bubbly music — the production puts a guilt-quelling distance between its onstage mayhem and its audience. The rowdy matinee crowd with which I saw the show hooted as gleefully as little Bart and Lisa do when they watch gore-filled “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoons on “The Simpsons.”

The three title characters of “Heathers” (played with sneering cheer by Jessica Keenan Wynn, Elle McLemore and Alice Lee) rule Westerburg High with expensively manicured fists of iron. With their more dimwitted male equivalents (embodied by Evan Todd and Jon Eidson) they mock and torture those who are less cosmetically perfect and more studious, with epithets usually banned in public discourse.

The doom of these tyrants is sealed when they recruit into their clique one Veronica Sawyer (a very good Barrett Wilbert Weed), a geek with makeover possibilities and a gift for forgery. “These are people I work for, and our job is being popular,” Veronica rationalizes to her previous best friend, the overweight, natural-born bully target Martha (Katie Ladner).

Veronica is deeply divided about her new social status, a state that Ms. Weed conveys engagingly, by singing and dancing while looking as if she weren’t sure whether she’s supposed to be enjoying herself. She’s ripe to be seduced by the school’s resident boy in black, J. D. Dean (the smooth Ryan McCartan of the Disney Channel’s “Liv and Maddie”), a Baudelaire-quoting renegade with a homicidal God complex.

For its first half, “Heathers” is skillfully sloppy fun, as it arranges the cool kids for vivisection with dopey blue jokes and prancing choreography by Marguerite Derricks. Mr. Murphy (“Reefer Madness”) and Mr. O’Keefe (“Legally Blonde“) provide the sort of bubbly generic score and sassy sendup lyrics now common to musical adaptations of film comedies. (I enjoyed J. D.’s ode to the numbing ecstasy of Slurpees.)

In the second act, the show turns serious, sort of. It almost seems to be apologizing for any untoward pleasure it may have afforded us before, as it ricochets between the antic and the conciliatory. (The movie had similar tonal adjustment problems toward its end.) The production would be more digestible if it were at least a quarter shorter. Not that the audience with which I saw “Heathers” seemed to mind. As you may know, drinks — the hard, kicky kind that the Heathers imbibe illegally — are served in the lobby of New World Stages. And though I’m loath to advocate drinking and theatergoing, this might be a show to see while slightly buzzed. Everything is writ large enough to penetrate an alcohol haze.

That includes the film’s most cited line, which is delivered directly and archly to the audience by Ms. Wynn. I can’t quote it in full, but it involves using a chain saw for sexual gratification. That’s “Heathers” for you.