Onstage at a cabaret club in New York’s Greenwich Village, a teenage girl wearing a red hoodie and knee-socks realises that she has just had her first orgasm. Naturally, she breaks into Ace of Base’s hit single I Saw the Sign.

This is Cruel Intentions – The Musical, an adaptation of the 1999 teen riff on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, now receiving a run at (Le) Poisson Rouge. It is the latest 90s film to become a stage musical, joining comedies such as Heathers, Muriel’s Wedding and Groundhog Day. A melodrama of adolescent jealousy and lust, it has a 90s jukebox score that sets the climactic fight scene to a medley of Meredith Brooks’ Bitch and REM’s Losing My Religion.

Jordan Ross, 29, who first conceived of the adaptation, and Lindsey Rosin, 32, who co-created and directed it, are too young to have seen the movie when it opened in US cinemas with an R rating. While the film received mediocre reviews, it scored at the box office, spurred by its trio of teen stars: Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe. A spit-swapping makeout session between Gellar and Selma Blair won the MTV movie award for best kiss and there were other then-scandalous elements such as rosary beads repurposed as cocaine storage.

Ross remembers seeing the movie a few years later at sleepover parties. “We had to wait for the parents to go to bed before we were allowed to put it in the VCR,” he says. “I definitely saw it too young.” In the movie, wealthy Manhattan stepsiblings Sebastian Valmont and Kathryn Merteuil place a bet to see if Sebastian can seduce Annette Hargrove, the virginal daughter of the new headmaster of the prep school everyone attends. If Kathryn wins, she gets Sebastian’s vintage roadster. If Sebastian wins, he can have Kathryn. “You can put it anywhere,” Kathryn purrs. If Sebastian can also find the time to ruin Cecile Caldwell (the orgasm-haver), so much the better.

The film had always stuck with Ross, for its racy situations, yes, but also for the real heartbreak – the teenage devastation of lost love – that seemed to underpin them. As an underemployed adult, he was flipping channels one day when he saw it again. Its soundtrack, heightened emotions and lingering cult status suggested that it might work as a musical. Ross was hoping to break into television, not theatre, but he was between jobs and an inspiration is an inspiration, so he called Rosin, a writer and director. “I was like, ‘Hell, yeah,’” says Rosin.

“Our feeling was always to make it a love letter to the movie,” she says. They sat down with the script for the film and a library of 90s music classics. In addition to numbers from the original soundtrack – a mildly eclectic collection that included tracks from Counting Crows and the Cardigans as well as the Verve’s swoony Bittersweet Symphony – they wanted to settle on a dozen or so more songs, “that immediately send you back to the moment when you heard them for the first time,” Ross says.

But as in a more traditional book musical, each song had to “drive the narrative forward,” Ross says. So the creators had to find the moments in the script that needed a song to amplify them and then find the songs that “just really spoke to what those characters are going through”. Sometimes the amplification is comic, as when Cecile sings the slow jam I’ll Make Love to You, and sometimes tragic, as when the seduced and abandoned Annette wails Foolish Games.

When the project first debuted in 2015 in Los Angeles, it was billed as a “completely unauthorized musical parody” but this had more to do with rights issues than any desire to lampoon the original. Rights to the movie and the music have subsequently been secured and the play quotes the film script verbatim, which means Ross and Rosin haven’t cut the characters’ homophobic slurs or the scenes of coerced sex.

During their second preview, Roger Kumble, the film’s writer and director, and Neil Moritz, a lead producer, came to see the show. “OK, this might be the end,” Rosin thought. But Kumble and Moritz embraced the project (Gellar and other original cast members also attended and enjoyed it), so much that they subsequently partnered with Ross and Rosin on rebooting the movie as a TV show. In 2016, NBC greenlit a pilot, but declined to order the series.

Yet the musical continues, with a twentysomething cast of sexed-up belters and Broadway veterans. (Le) Poisson Rouge is a small space that serves food and drink throughout the show, including a signature cocktail, the Bittersweet Symphony. Ross and Rosin like the intimacy, though they have asked waiters not to plonk food down during more intimate moments. Because while they want to convey all the salaciousness of the original, they also want to put across “the things that are dark and the things that are heartbreaking,” Rosin says. “It’s so easy to make fun of something, but it’s harder to proclaim that you love something.”

• Cruel Intentions is at (Le) Poisson Rouge, New York, until 19 February.