Back in 2013, in my last weeks as a high school senior, with plenty of free time on my hands, I wrote a survival guide for future students. This tome, full of wit and wisdom, remains unpublished, safely stored on a laptop buried somewhere in my closet. Which is just as well. I now realize Tina Fey had me beat by nearly a decade—ever since the release of Mean Girls, the movie she wrote satirizing high school cliques in all their, like, horribleness.
Based partly on a 2002 book by Rosalind Wiseman, Mean Girls was a hit in theaters in 2004, pulling in $86 million at the domestic box office (on a relatively small budget of $17 million). In the years since its release, it has become a cult classic. Mean Girls is famously quotable and perfectly suited for the quotes-and-pics style of social media give-and-take. Perhaps you’ve never seen the movie, but as with the King James Bible you may be quoting it anyway (the formulation “Stop trying to make [X] happen! It’s not going to happen” is probably the movie’s best-known contribution to meme banter). The movie bridges pop-culture divisions; as a leader from one social-media company told the Washington Post in 2014, “whether it’s Hunger Games or Harry Potter or Les Mis, those other fandoms attach themselves to Mean Girls. [They’re] using the quotes, the gifs, the lines, and the content [from Mean Girls] to extend their [own] fandom.”
Mean Girls was bound to take the next step. No, I’m not referring to Mean Girls 2, the low-carb made-for-TV movie released in 2011 that devotees politely ignore. The next step is the stage. Theater critics and true fans of the movie have been following rumors of a Mean Girls show since Tina Fey first hinted at the project a decade ago, and at last a musical adaptation is set to premiere on Broadway next March. Did I, hardly a true fan, take any satisfaction in seeing the show first, before millions of worshipers, during its just-completed short trial run at Washington’s National Theatre? Yes, I absolutely did. And I saw it on a Wednesday. (I hear “on Wednesdays we wear pink”?)
If you’ve seen the movie, you already know the plot of the musical. Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen, in the role Lindsay Lohan originated in the movie) grew up in Africa, where she was homeschooled by her zoologist parents. The family moves back to the United States and enrolls Cady in high school, an experience that her parents ominously and correctly predict will “socialize” her. On her first day, Cady breaks all the rules of the jungle—she doesn’t understand her teachers’ arcane classroom policies and, what’s worse, is clueless about the social dynamics among her fellow students—but she soon makes friends who explain to her how the school’s cliques work. She sets out to destroy the queen of the bitches, Regina George (Taylor Louderman, in the movie’s Rachel McAdams role). Drama ensues. There’s a cute guy, and, well, you get the picture.
On the walk to the theater I noticed a singular pair of parachute pants in bright pink, the favorite color of Regina’s clique. Along the way we were joined by highlighter-pink skirts, purses, and stilettoes. Ticketholders were easy to spot, making interviews a breeze: females ages 15 to 30, schoolteachers, and gay men. (A prominent character—Damian, one of Cady’s true friends—is memorably described in the movie as “too gay to function,” and the actor playing the part in the musical, Grey Henson, is one of the show’s highlights. He’s playing an exaggerated, obnoxious gay stereotype, but with a wink to the audience. He’s a satire unto himself and with brilliant subtlety lets us in on the joke.)
Above: Janis, Damian, and Cady (played by Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, and Lindsay Lohan) in the movie version of ‘Mean Girls.’ Below: The same three characters in the stage version of the show (played by, from left to right, Barrett Wilbert Weed, Erika Henningsen, and Grey Henson). [Top: Paramount Pictures. Bottom: Joan Marcus]
What I learned from some quick interviews on the sidewalk before the show is that for many of the theatergoers, Mean Girls wasn’t just a movie they enjoyed—it was a formative social experience. Several women I talked to said it had been their first PG-13 movie. One said she watched it with her friends, church youth group, and parents—a rare combination. Another called it “the sleepover movie,” the DVD selected when girls couldn’t agree on what to watch. And of course, Mean Girls helped many of them answer that all-important high school question: Who am I? As one interviewee told me, some days you might watch the movie and feel like Regina (a queen bee), other days you might feel like Karen (her duncey friend), still others you might feel like Cady (trying to figure it all out).
The performance itself was excellent, and even more fun after intermission when I joined the rest of the audience in drinking red wine. Mean Girls is hyperactive from the first bell and maintains its high energy throughout. Nearly every song is a big, loud dance number set in the school’s quintessentially oppressive cafeteria, classroom, and locker room; there’s also a house party. Scenes change instantly, often so quickly that the actors are making costume changes onstage. It’s hectic and so much fun—just like high school could be, at its best.
The show does have some problems to work out before it bows on Broadway. Several of the songs are musically too similar (as Peter Marks noted in the Washington Post, they are “rock numbers that range from catchy to undistinguished and come one after another”). The few times Mean Girls does slow down, the results are moving: Gretchen and Mrs. George (“I’m a cool mom!”) have been given their own sad songs, making their unlikable characters much more sympathetic. Regina, on the other hand, is twice as evil as in the movie—burning victims to the ground with the flick of her pink-painted nail. She enters the stage in a cloud of smoke, Vader-style, belting out her own song: “I’m Regina George, and I’m a massive deal.”
Thanks to the superb acting and direction, and to the emotional power of the music and choreography, the stage show of Mean Girls is funnier, more enjoyable, and better developed than the movie. This may seem somewhat strange, since the plot and the dialogue remain largely unchanged—which is no surprise, considering how much the fans love their favorite lines. Having rewatched the movie before attending the show, I was surprised at how often the musical was just a carbon copy. Even so, it wasn’t enough for some fans. One theatergoer complained to me after the show about the casting of Gretchen: “She’s not Asian in the movie—which, fine, whatever, I’m all for inclusion, but it, like, was weird.” It’s tough being a cult classic.
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Judging from its built-in fan base and what I saw during the show’s test run, Mean Girls has the makings of a Broadway smash. And maybe it was just the wine doing its work, but I left the theater warming to the idea that Mean Girls really has helped a lot of people through high school. Fans told me over and over that they loved the movie’s “message” and what it meant to them. A male teacher from an all-girls school told me that Mean Girls provides a “common language,” an “understood dialect,” that “bridges a gap between generations.” This seems right—the musical is well positioned to help bring the story into the era of social-media cyberbullying.
The only risk is in the fact that the production takes itself too seriously. The refrain of the concluding song is “just be kind and open-minded.” Groan. The actor who plays Damian, a master of nuance, was unfortunately given the show’s single worst line: “The moral of our story is . . .” Really? Mean Girls isn’t a classic because it hammers its moral teaching into its viewers’ heads. Mean Girls is a classic and deserves to go to Broadway because its moral teaching is embedded in its hilarious mockery of the worst time in a young person’s life. The only relief from all that angst is, as Cady says in the last scene of the movie, looking back on all the mistakes she’s made, “All the drama from last year just wasn’t important anymore.” If I could amend my own high school survival guide, I’d delete the whole thing and steal that one line from Tina Fey.
Grant Wishard is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
