Big themes and musical magic... it's Heathers in Chichester!

Welcome to Westerberg High where popularity is a matter of life and death.

The show is Heathers the Musical, and after smash-hit runs in London, New York and three record-breaking UK and Ireland tours, it is coming to Chichester Festival Theatre from Tuesday to Saturday, November 10-14.

Veronica Sawyer is just another of the nobodies dreaming of a better day. But when she’s unexpectedly taken under the wings of the three beautiful and impossibly cruel Heathers, her dreams of popularity finally start to come true. That is until JD, the mysterious teen rebel, shows up…

Playing Veronica is Gerardine Sacdalan: “Heathers is a deceiving kind of show, not your typical high-school show. A lot of the press around it and a lot of what people are saying, you think that it's going to be like Mean Girls but it is definitely not Mean Girls. Heathers takes that high-school trope and throws it on the floor and stamps on it and completely twists it around and turns it on its head. Heathers deals with lots of subjects that feel taboo. There are themes, trigger warning, of suicide and rape culture but it takes the deepest themes that are prevalent in high-school society and talks about them but shines a light on them in a magical and musical way.”

As Gerardine says: “Veronica starts off the musical as the outlier. I think the reason why a lot of people resonate with Heathers is that they see themselves in the different characters especially Veronica. Veronica does not quite fit. She has her best friends but within the society of the high school she finds herself at the bottom of the pile. She is smart. She is a very, very smart girl and she is a warrior. She fends for herself in that way but she does get herself entangled with the Heathers, the top of the pyramid girls, you could say the Mean Girls, and she finds herself entangled and a bit stuck in certain situations that she doesn't want to be involved in. By her own naivety she meets who she thinks is the love of her life, the new boy in town. She sees him as an escape from the Heathers but that in turn takes things to a whole different level of chaos.

“I saw the show when it first came to the Haymarket. I went with my mum and I just turned 17 at that point. I remember leaving having had the most fantastic time. There are deep themes in the show but the musical score of the show was just so fantastic that you just come out thinking ‘Oh my God! It is so amazing!’ But my mum left in tears... but good tears! It's the fact that it's bittersweet. This character goes through so much but has the ability to come out absolutely thriving. It touches on themes that kind of come out of the blue if you're not familiar with the show. I think people just react so differently to it, either absolutely emotionally touched by or just coming out completely buzzing.”