April 8, 2018

“Mean Girls” is the latest Broadway musical based on a popular screen title. It’s a trend that not everyone applauds. But with Tina Fey adapting her own 2004 screenplay for the stage, “Mean Girls” on Broadway is so fetch — and if you get the reference, this is the show for you. Fey updated her sharply amusing story about high school tribal culture to the present. It’s now framed as a cautionary tale. And while Fey and her most excellent director, Casey Nicholaw, made canny use of theatrical conventions for the musical, it still follows the film quite closely. Cady, who’s just moved to the United States from Africa, is having a hard time fitting in to the various cliques segregating the students at her new high school. She befriends a pair of mavericks, artsy Janis and Damian, who’s gay, who warn her about Regina George, the school’s most popular mean girl and her posse known as “The Plastics.” Cady falls in with them, suffers boyfriend problems, and learns some valuable life lessons in the process.

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April 8, 2018

An ode to self-respect and the benefits of a STEM-based education, Broadway’s Mean Girls is a lively, frequently hilarious adaptation of Tina Fey’s 2004 high school comedy. Propelled by dazzling set design and several stand-out performances, the musical — written by Fey, with music by Jeff Richmond, and directed by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon) — gives fans everything they want while bringing the saga of Regina George and the Plastics into the social media age.

The story sticks to the script, often literally, of the original film: After moving from Kenya with her parents, Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen) leaves the safety of a home-schooled environment for the hormonal jungle of North Shore High School outside Chicago. There she’s adopted by two groups of friends on the opposite ends of the social spectrum: Proud outsiders Janis Sarkisian (Barrett Wilbert Weed) and Damian Hubbard (Grey Henson), and their pink-clad nemeses Regina George, Gretchen Wieners, and Karen Smith. This means, of course, that Cady has an important decision to make — a choice that’s laid bare in “Where Do You Belong?”, a spirited song-and-dance showcase for Henson’s Damian, featuring a guided tour of North Shore’s cliques, and some very inventive choreography with cafeteria trays.

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April 8, 2018

Those high-school girls who laughed themselves silly at Tina Fey’s 2004 movie “Mean Girls” are now old enough to take their own teenaged daughters to this bouncy musical adaptation of that girly movie. The show’s high fun factor comes as no surprise —  its undying theme of high-school-as-living-hell lends itself to the gaudy excesses of the Broadway musical form. You can’t have too much pink or too much bitchery in a show about pretty, popular “Apex Predators” (as one of the witty songs would have it) who pounce on their helpless prey and leave their victims traumatized for life. Director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw (direction = 9/10, choreography = 6/10) gets this material. The stage swirls with non-stop traffic, if not perfectly executed dance movement. And Gregg Barnes’s costumes come in vividly clashing colors. The staging is actually too busy, too colorful, too loud, as if Nicholaw doesn’t want us to notice that not much of interest is happening.

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April 8, 2018

At least one of the characters in Broadway’s Mean Girls would describe this musical adaptation of Tina Fey’s 2004 not-for-teens-only film comedy as absolutely fetch. And fetch it is, whether that word ever happens or not. Vibrant, beautifully sung and visually splendid, this funny charmer – book by Fey, music by Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin – broadens the original Paramount movie – a bar-raiser for teen flicks – to full musical comedy scale without sacrificing any of the mordancy and compassion that made a superstar of Lindsay Lohan and a generational descriptor of the title. Directed and choreographed by The Book of Mormon‘s Casey Nicholaw (and produced by, among others, Lorne Michaels, who surveyed this preview performance with the same inscrutable, puckered expression caught occasionally by the cameras of Saturday Night Live) Mean Girls, at the August Wilson Theatre, stays true to the plot (and well-remembered jokes and catchphrases) of the film while smoothly updating the high school mischief-making for the age of social media.

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April 8, 2018

Let me say up front that if I were asked to choose among the healthy lineup of girl-power musicals now exercising their lungs on Broadway, you would have to count me on Team Regina. That’s a reference to the alpha leader of the nasty title characters of “Mean Girls,” the likable but seriously over-padded new show that opened at the August Wilson Theater on Sunday night.

I hasten to add that I am in no way endorsing the crushing elitist behavior of Regina George, a teen clique queen embodied here with red- (or rather pink-) hot coolness by Taylor Louderman. I was once a public high school student myself, and writhed painfully beneath the long, glossy talons of many a Regina.

But the jokes, poses and put-downs that Regina delivers and inspires in others in this musical, adapted from the 2004 film, are a lot more entertaining than the more earnestly aspirational doings of the heroines of “Frozen,” “Anastasia” and, their deathless sorority founder, “Wicked.”That’s because Regina and her frenemies converse in dialogue by the peerless comic writer Tina Fey.

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