With a fresh script and songs by KT Tunstall, the all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of the seminal Nineties teen movie starring Alicia Silverstone has finally hit the West End… starring actors who weren’t even alive when the film was released. Annabel Nugent meets them, along with writer/director Amy Heckerling
Time travel may not yet be possible, but for the next best thing watch Clueless. In the two decades since its release, Amy Heckerling’s cult-classic teen movie has become shorthand for Nineties pop culture: flip phones, plaid skirts, sassy slang. The two syllables of its title seem to pack more nostalgia than literal rose-tinted glasses. At the centre of it all is, of course, Alicia Silverstone’s blonde, sweet-as-pie high schooler Cher, a Beverly Hills update on Jane Austen’s most likeably unlikeable heroine Emma.
Now 30 years after the film’s release, Clueless the Musical has arrived in the West End, with original music by Noughties guitar queen KT Tunstall. No one is happier about this than Heckerling herself, who has written a new script, and who from the start had always pictured her candy-coloured story set to snazzy choreography….