The cult classic hit the big screen three decades ago but is still as relevant as ever. Now it’s being turned into a West End musical by its writer-director, Amy Heckerling
‘My plastic surgeon doesn’t want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose.” So says the high school student Amber during a PE lesson in the 1995 film Clueless, trying to explain why she shouldn’t have to play tennis. “Well, there goes your social life,” her classmate Dionne replies, delivering one of the best comebacks in movie history — and just one memorable line from one of the most quotable films of the Nineties.
It was Clueless, after all, that embedded the terms “as if” and “whatever” in the cultural lexicon. And Clueless that launched the careers of Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, made the tartan two-piece famous and spawned an entire genre of Nineties and Noughties American high school rom-coms, where nose job bandages and flip phones were as common as crushes and catfights.
No wonder, then, that it is getting a musical makeover, with Clueless: The Musical opening in the West End later this month. “When we were making the film, there were so many opportunities for musical montages and I often thought, ‘This is where people would sing.’ It just felt like a musical,” says Amy Heckerling, the writer and director of Clueless, who has adapted her film into an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. The music is by the award-winning Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, while the lyrics are by the Grammy-winning and Tony-nominated Glenn Slater, a veteran of musical theatre who has worked on the Broadway version of The Little Mermaid and Sister Act: The Musical…..