‘Mean Girls’ Review: Tina Fey Musical Makes Broadway Honor Roll

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.