Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical review – Exercise in nostalgia ends up feeling like a depressing throwback

The 20th century ended with a glorious crop of teen movies that crept under the skin of a whole generation. Still, strip away the nostalgia and these chronicles of high school life can look cynical, offensive, sex-obsessed and just plain mean. None more so than Cruel Intentions, the story of a creepily enmeshed stepbrother and sister who shag and manipulate their way through high school in their quest to come out on top.

Subtitled “The ’90s Musical”, this stage version nails the original’s acid punchlines but not the tone, blunting its dark edge with a score of the decade’s bubbliest songs.

It’s an adaptation that first popped up in America a decade ago, with the movie’s original writer Roger Kumble co-authoring a jukebox version of his hit take on the 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Now, director Jonathan O’Boyle – who’s presided over a slew of nimble stagings of off-West End musicals – has taken it in hand, with a killer cast mostly making up for a flimsy production budget.

Sebastian (Daniel Bravo) and Kathryn (Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky) are immaculate as its central duo of schemers, radiating hilarious, psychopathic intelligence as they plot to destroy innocent young Cecile as an elaborate form of revenge against Kathryn’s ex.

“As Cruel Intentions is set in 1999, some of the language reflects that time,” warns a very 21st-century notice as the audience file in. But that quickly feels like an understatement. This duo’s dark trajectory is studded with casual racism, homophobia, and messy questions about consent, which O’Boyle’s production only half-attempts to resolve.

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Yes, Cecile’s mother gets called out for her discrimination against Black cello tutor Ronald (Nickcolia King-n’da) – with the cast singing “No Scrubs” to send up her snobbery. But Cecile’s own storyline is treated with dazzling crassness. The gorgeous-voiced Rose Galbraith is full of uncomfortably childlike gaucheness as this virginal teenager, whom the scheming Sebastian plies with booze then coerces into sex.

When she’s telling Kathryn about the encounter, she describes how she disliked it at first, then learnt to enjoy it – an understanding of female sexuality cribbed directly from the 18th-century source text – then breaks into an awkwardly peppy rendition of “The Sign” by Ace of Base, to bewildered audience laughter.

It’s a typical misstep from an adaptation that’s slick and pacy without really understanding the messed-up nihilism that makes the original film work. And O’Boyle’s production doesn’t do it many favours. Two songs are borrowed from the original film – Placebo’s “Every You Every Me” and The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” – but they don’t have the same epic, tortured quality here, thanks to underwhelming orchestration and choreography.

Everything feels a bit kitsch, a bit commercial, and lacking in the unique 18th-century-France-meets-preppy-Americana aesthetic vision that made the original work.

If you wanted to make a Nineties jukebox musical, there are dozens of better stories to do it with: this exercise in nostalgia ends up feeling like a depressing throwback, not a thrillingly twisted dive into the past.

‘Cruel Intentions’ is running until 14 April at The Other Palace Theatre, London