Reviews of Heathers: The Musical and Motherhood Out Loud 

Then the movie first came out in 1989, Heathers was already raunchy enough for an R rating. But after the musical revels of Bat Boy, Spring Awakening, Reefer Madness, and Evil Dead have already pushed the envelope, raunchy in 2016 is an altogether different proposition. Three of the first six songs in the new Queen City Theatre Company production of Heathers: The Musical take us to places where the movie feared to tread.

"Candy Store" is fairly ballsy as the three Heathers — Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke — lay down the rules for admission into their elite clique. But it's Veronica's "Fight for Me" that tells us ballsy is just the beginning. Newcomer J.D. shows her there's somebody else to be impressed with at Westerburg High School. Yes, the backup singers are chanting "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!" Pretty soon, J.D. is encountering Veronica at a 7-Eleven and enticing her with the mind-numbing effects of Slurpees in "Freeze Your Brain," comparing a deep sip to a hit of cocaine.

But when "Dead Girl Walking" climaxes, it's a full-blown copulation song of animalistic force. And unlike the movie, where J.D. is always breaking into Veronica's bedroom, here it's Veronica hungering for J.D. and hunting him down. "Shut your mouth," she commands, "and lose them tighty-whities!"

With Laurence O'Keefe and Kevin Murphy combining on the book, music, and lyrics, Heathers is actually the lovechild of the mischief-makers who had separately brought us Bat Boy and Reefer Madness. Besides Bat Boy, O'Keefe can claim the musicalized Legally Blonde on his résumé, while Murphy was head writer on Desperate Housewives. That should adequately preface my declaration that the musical, which rocked the off-Broadway scene in 2014, outclasses the movie in every way.

The music certainly does rock, and with KC Roberge and Matt Carlson as our leads, it's rocking harder here in the QC than it does on the original cast album. Directing the show, Glenn T. Griffin steers us quickly away from Glee territory, with Carlson's highly-amped and punkish read on J.D., a brilliant move when the dreamboat turns out to be a raving psychotic.

But while Veronica mulls over the relative merits of staying in the Heathers' good graces or killing them off — an ambivalence Roberge sustains earnestly — it isn't all sex, drugs, and rock. There are three pointed ballads in Act 2, one by a surviving Heather who is contemplating suicide, another by the cruelly shunned Martha Dunnstock (nicknamed Dump Truck) about her halcyon days in kindergarten, and a wistful Veronica-J.D. duet, "Seventeen," on the charms of being ordinary humdrum high schoolers.

When they aren't plotting date rape, footballers Ram and Kurt are the clowns you expect jocks to be, but the unexpected jolt of new comedy happens at their funeral when their dads deliver their eulogies. Time after time, J.D.'s acts of homicidal mayhem result in unlikely epiphanies. The Heathers Band, led at the keyboard by Mike Wilkins, gives rousing support to "My Dead Gay Son" and all the other showstoppers, but it's Tod Kubo's choreography that pushes the big ensembles over the top.

The three Heathers retain their iconic croquet mallets from the film, but costume designers Beth Killion and Ramsey Lyric get Griffin's drift and take their outfits in a more dominatrix direction. Together in various synced poses, they are sensational — all in major roles for the first time.

Tessa Belongia, a senior at Northwest School of the Arts, has the requisite queen bee regality for Heather Chandler, a bitch that O'Keefe and Murphy just couldn't bear putting to sleep. She appears just once after J.D. offs her with Drano in the film, but here in the musical, she haunts Veronica repeatedly.

You wonder which Heather will be top dog after Chandler's demise, and Nonye Obichere proves to be a worthy successor as Duke, not at all the dimwit of the movie but a lingering villainess until the finale.

Ava Smith, who also auditioned for the Blumey Awards last Saturday, was McNamara, the most sensitive of the Heathers, but she doesn't give away her softness too soon.

Martha is a conflation of two of Veronica's classmates in the film, making for a more satisfying stage character than either of her film components, and Allison Andrews capitalizes big-time on her anguished moment in the spotlight, "Kindergarten Boyfriend." Griffin's casting, Liam Pearce as linebacker Ram and Kaleb Jenkins as quarterback Kurt, cures the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum aspect of the film — Pearce is far taller — helping us to feel that Martha is smitten by a real person rather than a generic jock in a school jacket. The horny pals are also a pretty effective comedy team.

Notwithstanding Carlson's spiked hairdo, there's a thread of 80's nostalgia that lingers on. J.D. has this Paleolithic, Oklahoma City notion of destroying his high school by planting remotely controlled dynamite packs throughout the building and setting them off with a detonator hidden down in the basement. Pretty lame compared with today's hip style of grenades and assault weapons, right?

Adults are all as clueless as we remember from teen films immemorial, if not a bit eccentric. Here they're interchangeable enough for three elders to play multiple roles. Alyson Lowe is funniest as Ms. Fleming, the hippy-dippy teacher who wants the student body to assemble and ventilate after each murder. Steven Martin and Nathan Crabtree split four Dads between them, but their gay moment at the church funeral is unforgettable — and so very 2016.

What a wonderful idea Susan R. Rose and Joan Stein had for a Mother's Day theatre event: a group of monologues and brief sketches, mostly by women playwrights, called Motherhood Out Loud. Turns out the brilliance of this idea largely belongs to Three Bone Theatre which staged the Charlotte premiere at McBride & Bonnefoux Center for Dance Studio last weekend. Nearly every other production that came up in my Google search, dating back to Fall 2011, opened during some month other than May.

The timing helped, for some of the 22 stories were sappy, and the five "fugues" that prefaced the five chapters — "Fast Births," "First Day," "Sex Talk," "Stepping Out," and "Coming Home" — were unnecessary. The best segments were those that confounded expectations.

Although she perpetrated all those fugues, Michele Lowe also wrote "Queen Esther," narrated by a Jewish mother whose son refuses dress up as any of the customary male characters for his school's Purim party.

"If We're Using a Surrogate...," by Marco Pennette, was a gay father's account of arranging — and attending — his daughter's birth, two very awkward meetings with an obliging lesbian. Theresa Rebeck's "Baby Bird" brought us the experience of an American mother adopting a Chinese baby, and "Michael's Date," by Claire LaZebnik, was a mother's account of chaperoning her autistic son on his first date.

Perhaps the most unexpected piece was "Elizabeth," where a divorced man goes home to his elderly mom and finds that he needs to mother her.

A cast of 18, sensitively directed by Kim Parati, helped us over the rough spots. So did that timing when we came to Jessica Goldberg's "Stars and Stripes," about a military mother, and Annie Weisman's concluding "My Baby," an unabashed description of the joy and pain of childbirth. No better time for these than Mother's Day.