If you’re not even a little excited about the Heathers musical, based on the iconic 1989 movie, then you clearly ate a brain tumor for breakfast. Everyone’s favorite croquet-playing, scrunchie-wearing, suicidal, high-haired teen queens are coming back for a second turn in the spotlight thanks to writers Larry O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy—except this with songs titled everything from “My Dead Gay Son” to “Freeze Your Brain.” We caught up with O’Keefe over the phone during rehearsals for the three-performance only concert presentation at Joe’s Pub.

Why do you think a 20-year-old movie about high school is still a cultural touchstone?

High school is still scary. It will always be scary. It will always be the place where people who have just hit adolescence are desperately trying to mask their emotions and protect themselves in this lifeboat crammed with people their own age, and tempted to push people out of the lifeboat. We all have the feeling like I want to kill someone, I want to find a hero to save me, to protect us, to redeem me, redeem our entire community. We have a tendency to place our faith in someone who should have known was destined to betray us. If you don’t like the way your school or your community is being run, you can’t just complain into your diary, like Veronica does in the beginning. You have to stand up, be shot at, and take control. And in so doing, you have to be sure you don’t become Heather yourself. It’s very easy to become what you behold and start giving back the anger and hatred you get.

What drew you to musicalizing Heathers in the first place?

I like songs about life and death because I’m lazy [laughs], and it’s easier to sing songs about life and death. It’s also about power, about our own culture right now, about how we have to find a way to be optimistic, to find a way to be good to each other. Also, the depth of the emotions. Everyone has a crossroads, and you can sing about that. For these characters, this is life and death for them. People are dying around them, there’s terrible things they don’t understand.

Are you worried at all about audiences being pissed that you’ve fucked with a classic?

My hunch is that anyone who would actually get indignant over someone changing one or two of the trappings of the movie is a very angry person [laughs]. We’re not changing the point of view of the movie or how terrifying it is to be in high school and how your emotions can do a 180 from ecstatic to terrified. It would have been very easy making this an exercise in nihilism or bitchiness or camp. But these characters are in dire straits. So I thought we could get mileage out of it if we took their lives seriously. [Also] remember Martha Dumptruck? In our version, we kind of folded the character of Betty [Veronica’s sweet ex best friend] into her. And she’s hopelessly in love with [football player and bully] Ram. So we decided our backstory was Martha and Ram were boyfriend and girlfriend in kindergarten. But she never stopped loving him. So after he’s dead, she sings “Kindergarten Boyfriend” about how she would rather live in the afterlife and be with him than live without him.

Tell us about some of the other songs.

We have two new songs that we’ve added since the L.A. version. In the stage version, we start earlier and Veronica is unpopular and abused and neglected, and by the end of the opening number, “Beautiful,” she has been taken in by the Heathers and turned into someone beautiful and popular. And the very next song is called “Candy Store,” which details the fine print. The era is interesting, musically, but I’m not doing an ’80s-tune show, like The Wedding Singer (which I think was underappreciated). The music does have bubblegum, but it’s also fascist bubblegum from the Heathers.

Heathers,

Sept. 13 & 14, Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & E. 4th St.), 212-967-7555, www.joespub.com; Sept. 13, 7 & 9:30, Sept. 14, 11, $20.