Theatre review: Heathers

London might have to wait a bit longer for the musical adaptation of Mean Girls, but another classic American high school movie about, well, mean girls, gets the musical treatment in the meantime. Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy’s Heathers, based on the film by Daniel Waters, premiered off-Broadway and has been further workshopped since, now arriving on The Other Palace’s main stage in a production directed by Andy Flickman. Heather Chandler (Jodie Steele,) Heather McNamara (Sophie Isaacs) and Heather Duke (T’Shan Williams) are top of the social ladder of an Ohio High School, and led by the fearsome Heather Chandler they pass judgement on who should be accepted or demonised. When they discover Veronica (Carrie Hope Fletcher) has a talent for forgery they allow her to join their gang, but when she refuses to go along with bullying her oldest friend Martha (Jenny O’Leary) she’s kicked back to the bottom of the social pecking order.

Theatre review: Dessa Rose

Based on a novel by a man named Lear Sherley Anne Williams, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's musical Dessa Rose gets its European premiere by bringing some big voices into the small space of Trafalgar Studio 2. Set in America's Deep South in 1846, it follows the fractious, unlikely friendship between two women, one black, one white. Dessa Rose (Cynthia Erivo) is a pregnant, teenage slave who, when the father of her child is killed, violently rebels. Condemned to be executed once the baby's born she has no intention of sticking around her cell that long. Ruth (Cassidy Janson) is the lonely wife of a plantation owner (John Addison) whose lengthy business trips culminated in him never returning. Raised by a slave who was the only person she ever loved, Ruth is sympathetic to escaped slaves, and doesn't ask many questions if a group of black people turns up on her land.