At Manhattan’s Signature Center, where the new musical Be More Chill opens this week, the excitement in the air was as palpable as it could possibly get in those lingering minutes before the lights dim and the curtain parts. Since it first premiered three years ago with a month-long run at New Jersey’s Two River Theater, Be More Chill has amassed a cultish following on the internet, comprised mostly of teenagers who’ve never seen the show live but listen to its cast recording religiously (it has over 100m streams on Spotify); or write fan-fiction about its characters; or start Tumblr “digi-zines” to commiserate about the show’s themes of love, lust, loyalty and loserdom. It’s a high school musical for those who were too young for High School Musical, the zany, theatrical bildungsroman of a generation raised on iPhones, “woke”-ness, and readily accessible internet porn.

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Which is where the show begins, with Jeremy, the hero and perennially un-chill outcast, squeezing lotion out of a bottle as porn buffers on the laptop in front of him. Played by a fantastic (and convincingly youthful) Will Roland, who originated the role of Jared in Dear Evan Hansen, Jeremy is anxiety and self-doubt personified. In the show’s frenzied opening number, he weighs whether he should take the bus to school or not. “A junior on the bus is killer weak,” he sings, but if he walks his “boxers will be bunchy and my pits will leak.” They’re the sorts of daily negotiations that characterize many people’s experience of high school, where around every locker, bleacher and urinal lurks the prospect of humiliation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cast of Be More Chill. Photograph: Maria Baranova/Be More Chill

But what if a pill, suggests the newly popular Rich, could fix all that? It’s a question Jeremy’s willing to entertain, so he spends his Bar Mitzvah money on a strange, conspicuously unregulated Japanese capsule called Squip, which implants a computer in Jeremy’s brain that coaches him through the everyday trials and tribulations of high school. “Arch your back, puff out your chest,” says the Squip, who quickly becomes a constant, derisive voice in Jeremy’s head, appearing on stage as a handsome man dressed like a sentient Macbook. Jeremy’s best friend and fellow-reject Michael supports his attempts to become popular, although he theorizes that, with technology bringing us to Darwinism’s logical conclusion, “there’s never been a better time in history to be a loser”.

In some ways, he’s right. The students who make up the show’s cast – the theatre nerd, the jock, the blonde-haired popular girls, the punk – are proudly self-realized, prancing around the stage in cheetah-print pants and jackets emblazoned with the word “feminist”. But for all their supposed conviction, they’re the same gangly, insecure high-schoolers most of us were, having been updated for an age where the the popularity food-chain is a bit less cut and dry than it once was. “High school is hell,” says Michael, played by the show’s clear standout George Salazar. “Guys like us are cool in college.”

Stephanie Hsu as Christine in Be More Chill. Photograph: Maria Baranova/Be More Chill

Joe Iconis is the man behind the show’s witty, resonant, and often lacerating lyrics, set to maximalist, pop-rocky compositions that, at times, threaten to overwhelm both the actors and the story. Should the show make it to Broadway – where it seems, on the shoulders of its viral fanbase, to be headed – it could stand to cut a good deal of fat; some of book writer Joe Tracz’s punchlines were met with crickets, and the second act often gets in its own way, following whims that are ill-advised if not entirely random. But when the train seems about to derail, as it did a couple of times in the show’s last hour, Be More Chill is salvaged by its hearty, charismatic performances, particularly those of Roland, Salazar, and Stephanie Hsu, who plays the Streisand-worshipping theatre nerd Christine.

Salazar’s solo Michael in the Bathroom is the show’s high-water mark, building in intensity as Michael hides from his classmates during a Halloween party he wasn’t invited to. It’s the show’s most honest and least choreographed number, where all the angst and isolation of being 16 crescendoes while a lengthening line of partygoers assemble outside the bathroom door. Iconis’ music and lyrics are nothing if not au courant, filled with jargon and pop culture references, but Michael in the Bathroom, one of the show’s few moments of restraint production-wise, is its best and most universal number, one with which every audience member could conceivably identify.

Beyond the horrors of high school, Be More Chill has a lot to say about self-medicating, too. Like Lucy Prebble’s acclaimed 2016 play The Effect, in which two participants in a clinical drug trial fall for one another and wonder if its love or merely dopamine, the show doesn’t condescend to the desire for a panacea in pill form. It understands that the notion of chillness, that elusive state of nonchalance, has cultural capital. “Is it chill that I said all that?” asks Taylor Swift in her song Delicate, wondering if she’s put too many of her cards on the table. “Take a chill pill,” Bridget Fonda’s Melanie tells Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown. And, of course, there’s the more euphemistic “Netflix and Chill.” But chillness, the show suggests, is a bit of a farce. No one really has it, least of all the people who seem like they do.