Annotations for Alice lee katie ladner barrett wilbert weed and elle mclemore seventeen reprise

Lyric: Maybe we won’t grow old
Annotation:
It’s sad when you think about it. Heather Chandler, Kurt, Ram, and J.D. will never grow old. Like Veronica said, “they still had room to grow.”

Lyric: Martha, are you free tonight?
Annotation:
In the play, Martha is shown riding a mobility scooter and an arm cast from her suicide attempt. The audience laughs at this.

Lyric: I can’t promise no more Heathers
Annotation:
Veronica is saying that there will always be people like the Heathers that will act better than you, and that’s a fact you have to come to terms with. While they got rid of the Heathers for now, but more people like them will always be there to get in their way.

Lyric: Celebrate you and I
Annotation:
This shows contrast to the song “Beautiful” and the rest of the musical, where they live in cliques and are extremely mean to each other. This shows their change of heart, saying they should “celebrate” each other.

Lyric: But let’s kick back tonight
Annotation:
This is their realization that they should enjoy their youth and time together before its over. As they say prior, they have time in the future to make a difference, but for now, as teenagers growing up, they should enjoy themselves as you can never go back to that time in your life.

Lyric: VERONICA & MARTHA
Annotation:
At some point in this song, Heather McNamara runs over and joins Veronica and Martha, specifically because Veronica offers her a hand.  Out of all the previous Heathers, McNamara was always the nicest and most caring, possibly the only friend Veronica had with the Heathers. With her recent suicide attempt and being out-cased by Heather Duke, McNamara is looking for a new start—with Veronica and Martha. It’s wrong not to mention her, so I am.

Lyric: Listen up folks
Annotation:
A favorite, ‘listen up bitches’ line. Veronica has the red scrunchy of power and people are listening to her. She’s calling the attention out of the chaos that followed the pep rally. Basically a…  Note that this is similar to a line Heather Chandler used back in “ Candy Store”: Listen up, biotch! Here, however, you can see the difference between them: Veronica addresses them as “folks” instead of insulting them.

Lyric: We can be seventeen (Oh, oh)
 Still time to make things right (Oh, oh)
Annotation:
Every time they sang of being seventeen, it always seems to refer to how they’ve been growing too soon, losing their innocence and missing out their supposed youth. Of how they wanted to be seventeen to enjoy those child-like times again. However, placed directly before the “still time to make things right” shows how they’re truly young but not  that young. It shows how they’re clearly old and mature enough now to feel regret and recognize between the good and the bad. That rather than going back to seventeen, a time of happy-go-lucky-ness; they want to go back to  seventeen, a time where second—third—maybe fourth chances still exist.

Lyric: I’d be honored
 If you’d let me be your friend
Annotation:
This is perhaps one of Veronica’s effort to fix ‘the world’. Showing the world how she as a ‘Heather’ with the red scrunchie, while also ‘lowering herself’ to being friends with Martha. This is a way of telling everyone to take another look at themselves and equalize their statuses with one another, so that  a world where Martha’s and Heather’s being friends  can happen. On a shallower note, this is Veronica apologizing for sort of brushing aside Martha during her ‘being popular’ phase and wanting to be friends again.

Lyric: What?
Annotation:
This single word shows how honestly confused Martha was at the sudden question directed to  her. Seeing how her former best friend has changed, Martha was already giving up hopes of reconnecting with Veronica, especially when she now earns the red scrunchie. This word also shows how Martha too has changed (as we’ve witnessed what her mind concludes in  “Kindergarten Boyfriend”), gone was the sweet cheerful girl in act One (or some parts of her, at the very least).

Lyric: High school may not ever end
Annotation:
Veronica is not saying that they’re never going to graduate. Rather, she’s saying that high school is hell, it’s hard on people, and even after they graduate, life may not be easy. Life may still be tough and hard on people like high school is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrxIeuTX4A

Lyric: Take off our clothes and dance
Annotation:
The girls talking about taking off their clothes and dancing is usually referring to how wild teenagers are, and they’ll do anything as long as it’s fun, but this is what makes a teenager a teenager, they’re wild and they accept that, because they still want to have fun while they’re still young.

Lyric: So, I was wondering, if you weren’t doing anything tonight, maybe we could pop some Jiffy Pop?
 Rent a video?
 Something with a happy ending
Annotation:
This alludes back to  “Beautiful” when Martha and Veronica planned to have a movie night together, watching Princess Bride and eating Jiffy Pop.

Lyric: My date for the pep rally
Annotation:
JD, during  “Meant To Be Yours” states that he is taking Veronica as his date to the Pep Rally, where he plans to blow up everyone.

Lyric: We’re all freaks, but that’s alright
 We’ll endure it, we’ll survive it
Annotation:
At the beginning of the musical, in the first song  “Beautiful”, Veronica’s classmates can be heard shouting insults at each other including “freak!”, which is used here to describe everyone. Everyone at her school is a freak, technically, with their own oddities. “We’ll endure it, we’ll survive”. This is a common theme between Veronica and JD, with them both always thinking, “I can survive as long as I have this person”, mainly noted in  “Seventeen”, as this is the reprise of that song! It’s very clever and a nice thing to note.

Lyric: We’re all damaged, we’re all frightened
Annotation:
When Veronica says ‘we’re all damaged’ it’s a reference to the familiar line. “I am damaged” or, “We are damaged”, that Veronica and J.D. have sung many times. She’s using it this time, to describe everyone, now that J.D. is gone. She’s saying that everyone is damaged in their own way. J.D. used it to mean that they had seen more and knew more and it made them better, but Veronica is saying that everyone has been through stuff and it doesn’t make them better or worse than anyone else.

Lyric: We are done with acting evil
 We will lay our weapons down
Annotation:
Throughout the musical, Veronica and J.D. have constantly described the teenagers at their school as “mean and cruel” and the world as “cruel”. That means they are acting ‘evil’. Their weapons are words as well, so figurative weapons, which are used by the populars. With Veronica having the scrunchie now, though, she commands the weapons. Veronica says ‘acting evil’. After all this, she still genuinely believes that there is good in everyone.

Lyric: We can learn how to chill
Annotation:
Now, without the Heathers who certainly made Veronica insecure, anxious, and hectic with their mere presence, she and her fellow students can finally breathe. Due to the Heathers' constant omnipresence over Westerberg, their obsolescence is an unfamiliar change (that will likely be for the better). It’s somewhat different under Veronica’s interpretation, though; now that J.D.’s gone, she can relax knowing she won’t be involved in any more murders. It also points up that “chilling” is a skill that must be learned.  Here “chill” means to let go, forgive, be open to the ups and downs of life, etc. Chill could also be a reference to ‘freezing your brain’ and finding happiness and bliss in circumstances

Lyric: And maybe then we’ll never die
Annotation:
This is a reference to the opening song  “Beautiful”. Now that J.D. is dead, everyone now has a chance to recover and live life to the fullest: But I know, I know, life can be beautiful. I pray, I pray, I pray for a better way.  In the stage production, at the line “And maybe then we’ll never die”, all four of the teenagers who died in the musical (Heather Chandler, Kurt, Ram, and JD) come onstage to sing the final lines. They then go and to their respective groups: JD to Veronica, Chandler to McNamara and Duke, and Kurt and Ram join hands. JD actually addressed Heather McNamara but smiling and singing the line “Beautiful” at her, going back to the idea the Heathers were “beautiful”.

Lyric: If no one loves me now
 Someday somebody will
Annotation:
This line carries a double meaning for Veronica and Martha: for Veronica, she thought that JD loved her, but he was a psychopath; for Martha, she thought Veronica was her friend, but she betrayed her. This line also shows how Martha has moved on from her ‘kindergarten love’ of Ram. It’s also connected to Heater M and her line in “Candy Store”: “you can live the dream or you can die alone”.

Lyric: Blew— me off
Annotation:
Blew her off? He blew himself up. Her hesitation shows how she was ready to tell everyone the truth, about how she and J.D. were involved in everything, including the attempt to bomb the school. However, she soon changes her mind, and takes a deep breath before continuing the lie.
More accurate to say that Veronica wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to say, and nearly blurted out the news that JD had blown himself up, but at the last split second thought better of it.
To me, this shows that although we have perceived JD to be abusive, and Veronica stopped wanting to talk to him after a while, she still cared enough about him to the point that it was hard to talk about his passing
I think it more means that she would have toexplain why JD blew himself up, eventually admitting to the murder of Kurt, Ram, and Heather C.

Lyric: War is over
Annotation:
Throughout the musical, the idea of “war” has been repeated. There’s the war of high school and the war of life (as Veronica says to JD in “ I wish we’d met before they convinced you life is war!”). The war referenced here could thus mean several things. It could mean the war against the school by JD or the war within the school among the student body’s different factions. For the first meaning, the war is very much over because Veronica stopped it since JD’s dead. For the second meaning, however, the war being over sends a vibe of “I’m done with this ridiculousness so I’m going to end this once and for all.”

Lyric: Act like we’re all still kids
 ’Cause this could be our final chance
Annotation:
The theme of childhood is constant throughout the show. “Beautiful”- Several references to how things were better in childhood. “Candy Store”- Based off the “kid in a candy store” idiom “Big Fun”- referenced “acting your age” and also a childlike vocabulary and sound overall. “Seventeen”- Elaborated on further below. “Shine A Light (reprise)”- Heather D refers to Heather M as an immature, whiny child. Also her frustration at child-proof caps in the beginning. The Entirety of “Kindergarten Boyfriend”. In the show, everyone is so eager to grow up, while still presenting the theme of childhood. From the Heathers telling Veronica to “step into the candy store”, to Kurt and Ram encouraging “Big Fun” (that’s the most childlike vocab they could have used, in my opinion), to Veronica singing about it in “Beautiful”, everyone is focused on the past or escaping it. J.D. represents something bigger. He equates Veronica and himself to gods, with the power to choose who lives and who dies. In “Seventeen”, we see that JD has developed something bigger than just a “we’re better and more mature than other teenagers” complex, he has developed a God complex, believing he and Veronica have or deserve power over life and death. This is why “Seventeen” is the key turning point in the show. This is Veronica realizing that they’re just like other teenagers, that teenagers are worth saving (which motivates her to risk her life to save the school). This is the conflict between J.D. and Veronica, and in “I Am Damaged”, J.D. finally acknowledges this. The line “don’t know what this thing will do” shows that J.D. isn’t some mastermind genius serial killer. He’s a scared, depressed, psychotic kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Lyric: [MARTHA]
 My friend
Annotation:
She says this almost questioningly, which also shows how she has lost her childlike trusting nature.

Lyric: [MARTHA, spoken]
 Are there any happy endings?
Annotation:
This shows how Martha has changed throughout the play. Veronica betraying her got rid of her optimism, and if that didn’t make her grow up fast, then an attempted suicide after  remembering the bittersweet time of kindergarten when people liked her and everything was simple certainly did.  This also is a slight nod to Martha’s line in  “Beautiful”, “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a happy ending”.

Lyric: Brand new sheriff’s come to town
Annotation:
At this point, Veronica has the iconic red scrunchie, which represents that she is the new “sheriff”. First was Heather C, then Heather D, who were both corrupt and nasty in their own rights, then finally someone who could try and bring peace to this broken and corrupt high school. Also a reference to a line from the movie: “Heather, my love, there’s a new sheriff in town.”

