"Mean Girls" Takes Over Overture with a Cautionary Tale about High School
Broadway loves going back to high school, particularly when they can focus on kids who don’t fit in triumphing over the bullies who make their lives miserable. Whether students are boning up on words for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, or inventing a fictional friendship in Dear Evan Hansen, or poisoning the meanest girl in school in Heathers, or just trying to take a same sex date to a dance in The Prom, musical writers are spending a lot of time in high school hallways, dissecting the cliques that exude so much power on teens and how the square pegs can ultimately prevail.
Why do we care? Because we’ve all been there. And no matter how well adjusted you might be in adulthood, chances are you have vivid memories of crushing crushes, devastating insecurities, and paralyzing fear of being terrorized by the popular kids – the ones with all the clothes, the confidence, the cool and the clout. And that brings us to Mean Girls, the musical version of Tina Fey’s 2004 movie of the same name, which was based on the book Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence.
The Mean Girls Broadway tour filling Overture Hall through September 4 has all the basic plot points of the “high school is hard and mean girls suck” genre, but it’s buoyed by Fey’s book, which is exponentially smarter and funnier than most. It also goes beyond the platitudes of “just be yourself” and “follow your inner star” to explore the catty competitiveness, self-sabotaging, and endless double standards that girls face.
The misfit for this week is Cady (the smart and sunny English Bernhardt), a homeschooled math genius who has been raised in Kenya by her zoologist parents. Cady’s life in Africa is portrayed as an idyllic Lion King, complete with friendly zebras. It couldn’t be further away from her new adventure at the quintessentially American North Shore High School in a Chicago suburb. On her first day, she is figuratively thrown to the lions (the school mascot), with no knowledge of cool slang, peer groups, interactions with the opposite sex, or the latest teen fashion.
Fortunately, two campus outcasts take her under their wing – the gothy art girl Janis (a bold Lindsay Heather Pearce) and her best friend Damian (a thoroughly entertaining Eric Huffman), the guy who is “almost too gay to function.” They show Cady the ropes, introduce all the cliques, and tell her to beware the apex predators – the plastics – who are the meanest, prettiest, most powerful girls in the school. This pair of bitter but loveable outsiders also frames the show as a cautionary tale for the audience, warning us that some teens will do anything to be popular– and although no one in the musical technically dies due to this obsession, obviously it’s not good.
As Cady fails over and over to be accepted in her new school for who she is, of course she is tempted to go to the dark side – accept the plastics’ head diva’s invitation to join their evil cohort. Or at least sit with them at lunch and follow all the fashion rules, like when to wear pink and when to wear sweat pants, and generally how to patronize and put down everyone else. In the role of queen bee Regina George, Nadina Hassan oozes disaffected superiority, reveling in the ease of crushing others’ egos and even instructing her mother on what to do. With an icy, iron clad confidence, Regina lures Cady into her lair and then betrays and humiliates her because she can. So, you know, typical high school stuff.
Like Regina, her handmaidens are delicious stereotypes. The achingly insecure Gretchen (played to perfection by Jasmine Rogers) is desperate to have someone to please, and her song “What’s Wrong with Me?” is one of the musical and emotional highlights of the show. As the self-proclaimed dumb gorgeous girl, Morgan Ashley Bryant plays Karen as a woman capitalizing on her long legs and tiny skirts, who is unencumbered by deep thoughts. Her anthem “Sexy,” is a fantastic tongue-in-cheek ode to Halloween costumes that let girls be anything they want to be – and sexy! (Think sexy Rosa Parks, sexy ear of corn, sexy Yoda. . .)
By the time Cady sings “Fearless” as the act one closer, it seems like the story has come to an end, since our heroine has toppled the mean girl clique and realized how great it is to be herself. She has basically solved high school!
But then there’s act two. . . where Fey and her creative team slip in some serious contemporary feminist ideas to give the mean girls and the outcast girls some serious things to think about. Like why are guys praised for being assertive and girls criticized for being bossy? Why are young men taught to conquer and young women taught to compromise? And why are teen girls spending so much time attacking each other? Finally, why are high school girls told to embrace body positivity while their schools still hold dances where the whole school votes on who is the prettiest? It’s a refreshingly insightful interrogation of social ideas underneath the teen social scene. Fey is also very present in the character of the cool math teacher Ms. Norby (April Josephine, who morphs into several other adult roles with ease) and Josephine nails the “cynical educator who just can’t give up on her students” vibe.
Act two is also complicated by a lot of unexpected – and delightful – character developments that aren’t included in absolutely every high school saga. The meanest of the mean girls is revealed to be a real person with feelings. The angry, arty girl Janis and her “Revenge Party” fantasy is revealed to be part of the problem, not the solution. And it’s the hopelessly socially awkward nerds who turn out to be Cady’s biggest supporters. (Go mathletes!)
A thoroughly modern musical, Mean Girls is very fast paced and visually stunning, thanks to extensive use of video projected onto a blank slate set that can change in a millisecond without any scenery being wheeled on or off stage. But the projections can also sometimes be overwhelming, turning the theater performance into more of a movie with people acting in front of it. Intricate, ambitious choreography by director Casey Nicholaw is also executed at a break-neck pace, often giving the numbers the feel of a music video. (Extra credit here for extraordinarily creative use of desks and lunch trays.) The exception to that is the tap-dance number “Stop” led by the ever adorable Damian, which presumably gives the older members of the audience some traditional Broadway hoofing to enjoy. (To be fair, it’s pretty impressive, so even Gen Z viewers should be entertained.) And while the Mean Girls cast album hasn’t charted like Hamilton or gotten the underground attention of Heathers, it’s definitely hummable. Jeff Richmond’s music is both contemporary and varied in style, from traditional “I want” Broadway songs, to rap, to triumphant ballads.
So wear pink if you must, but go see Mean Girls, and ideally, bring along a teen or tween. The important messages are sandwiched in so much fun that they may not even notice they are learning something and having a really good time.