Tour Review: 'Mean Girls'
The North American tour brings the show back to D.C.'s National Theatre.
"Welcome to high school."
It's the opening line to Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of the 2004 teen comedy. But no, you aren't in one of the countless cafetoriums or summer camp stages where the musical and its non-professional licensing rights have taken over youth theatre programs nationwide. You're at the National Theatre in D.C., where the non-Equity North American tour has stopped for a full circle moment of sorts - the musical first premiered, pre-Broadway, at the National.
And it's still that high school classic you know and very likely love. Tina Fey's original screenplay is airtight, a masterclass in both story structure and one-liners, and while some of the humor hasn't aged well, the story of public school trauma caused by its self-imposed caste system has played for generations of high school students. It's the movie that made Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and Amanda Seyfried stars, that showed Fey could do more than SNL, and that made a national holiday out of October 3rd. It's bulletproof.
Cady Heron (Carly Ameling), having recently moved from Kenya, is new to North Shore High School and excited for the socialization and friendship-forming that public high school offers. Unfortunately, as she quickly learns, the cliques are well-established and mostly impossible to penetrate. She's taken in by Janis (Alexys Morera) and Damian (Joshua Morrisey), two social outcasts who offer to be her "starter companions" until she gets on her feet. Meanwhile, she's recruited by The Plastics, the Barbie figure popular girls led by queen bee Regina George (Maya Petropoulos), who accept her as one of their own and instantly shoot her to the top of the proverbial food chain. Caught between the two worlds, and used as a pawn for each side to hurt the other, Cady must figure out who she truly is.
Fey's screenplay is so strong, in fact, full of memorable moments and oft-quoted lines, that much of her book for the musical is retained word for word. As such, Jeff Richmond (Fey's husband) and Nell Benjamin, who wrote the music and lyrics respectively, don't want to musicalize any of her scenes and risk ruining the musical's movie memorability quota, so they invent new concepts to write songs about.
Remember the movie's great bit about apex predators? No? That's because they made it up so they could shoe-horn in a song called, you guessed it, "Apex Predator," about Regina's dominance. I'm not saying they needed to write songs called "You Go, Glen Coco" or "Diarrhea in a Barnes & Noble" (which the musical changes to diarrhea on a Ferris wheel. Why? Having an embarrassing gastric attack in a Barnes & Noble is a universally haunting experience), but if Musical Theatre Songwriting 101 is all about having characters sing when simple dialogue can no longer suffice, it's a course they've failed. Fey's movie (I don't pray at the alter of Fey like so many, but I know good story structure when I see it) already hits all of the emotional beats and does all of the work for them, so there's nothing left for them to write songs about. What we get instead is lyrics like "My name is Regina George and I am a massive deal" and "(I'm) smart with math but stupid with love," which don't exactly inspire sing-alongs.
The cast, naturally, handles the book better than the music. It's a difficult line, avoiding an impression of the iconic film performance and not wanting to sound like the Broadway cast album, making the character your own while keeping it familiar to audiences who expect it a certain way. Ameling, normally a swing for the production, has taken over the role of Cady for this D.C. stop, and could perhaps channel a bit of that outsiderism when faced with the Plastics, a trio who have all played these parts together for over a year on tour. That's a strong-backed Petropoulos as Regina, a distressed Kristen Amanda Smith as Gretchen, and the show's highlight, the quite funny MaryRose Brendel as ditzy blonde Karen. Morera and Morrisey recall the loveable losers from the film, while Kristen Seggio finds it easier to do her best Tina Fey (as teacher and mathlete coach Ms. Norbury) than her best Amy Poehler (Regina's not-like-other-moms mom.)
Those looking for the movie (or perhaps even the movie musical from earlier this year) are sure to be pleased. On Scott Pask’s sets (roll-in, roll-out, fly-in, fly-out pieces clearly designed for many of the tour’s one-night-stand stops in cities like Wabash and Bangor - though it is still much more stuff than most tours seem to truck around), you’ll visit the Plastics’ lunch table and the shopping mall and the Spring Fling and the Halloween party and the scene of the Burn Book crime, Regina’s bedroom. You’ll hear lines like “She doesn’t even go here!” and “He’s almost too gay to function,” and “You can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week, so I guess you chose today.” And you can wear pink (and not just on Wednesdays, my Tuesday evening performance was so pink that I felt left out) and style your hair any way you’d like and you can be transported all the way back to high school - whether or not that’s something you would enjoy.