Author: David Rooney / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Tina Fey’s hit 2004 big-screen comedy about a newbie infiltrating the reigning high school clique comes to Broadway in this musical directed and choreographed by Tony winner Casey Nicholaw.
There’s a place on Broadway for the intimate chamber piece, but going small is generally not the preferred route for a musical comedy spun out of a popular teen movie.
Writer Tina Fey and the creative team behind Mean Girls clearly understand this, as evidenced by their elevation of Regina George from imperious arbiter of high school hotness to full-blown arch villainess, a Medusa with a better hair care regimen. As played with a delectable streak of cruelty by the divine Taylor Louderman, Regina seems naturally to move in a slow-mo power strut, suffusing the air around her with an alluring pink glow no doubt hazardous to the environment.“I’m the prettiest poison you’ve ever seen. I never weigh more than one-fifteen,” coos Regina in “Meet the Plastics,” one of a handful of menacing solos that riff knowingly on the darkly glittering drama of classic James Bond theme songs, along with “Someone Gets Hurt” and “Watch the World Burn.”
If the songs composed by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond with lyrics by Nell Benjamin more often fall into workmanlike pastiche than inspired musical storytelling, too seldom developing robust melodic hooks, the score at least wins points for democratization. Every one of the principals gets a musical moment that tells us who they are, both the protective outer shell developed to survive the savage jungle of high school, and the tender human core, yearning to connect.
That plus the snappy comedy of Fey’s book makes this adaptation of the 2004 movie (which was directed by Mark Waters from a screenplay by Fey) a surprisingly enjoyable and genuinely funny sugar treat with a lot of heart. Enough of the film’s most memorable lines are retained to give fans what they want (“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!”). But it’s the new gags that freshen the formula, actually improving on the source material’s somewhat soft ending with a more satisfying payoff, while still pushing the broadside against bullying, bitchiness and unhealthy peer pressure. The updates to the era of smartphones and social media are clever and relevant. But the real key to the show’s success is its attention to the secondary characters, both in the writing and in the performances of an appealing cast.
It was a savvy move to centralize the two most defiant outsiders of North Shore High social stratification, artsy cynic Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed) and her quick-witted gay sidekick Damien (Greg Henson). They open the show with “A Cautionary Tale,” an address to freshmen students in which they share the missteps of their friend Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen) as a lesson in the corrupting dangers of buying into popularity contests.
That narrator function is used sparingly, but Janis and Damien are instrumental — as they were in the movie — in rescuing deer-in-the-headlights Cady on her first day at North Shore. Cady’s background as the home-schooled daughter of biologist researchers, growing up in Kenya, is deftly sketched by director Casey Nicholaw and video designers Finn Ross and Adam Young in the first of many whiz-bang transitions from the African savanna to the locker-lined school corridors during her first song, “It Roars.” That establishes the recurring motif of human/animal comparisons from the outset. But it’s the crash course in American teen subspecies, conducted by Damien and Janis — and illustrated by a versatile ensemble with fleet costume modifications — in “Where Do You Belong?” that kicks the show into high gear. (Especially loved the Woke Seniors.)
Of course that detailed ethnographic breakdown builds to the intro of the feared and worshipped “Plastics” — “shiny, fake and hard.” Regina is flanked by her handmaidens: insecure, desperate-to-please Gretchen (Ashley Park, a delight), who gets one of the show’s standout songs in the poignant “What’s Wrong With Me?”; and blissfully dim Karen (Kate Rockwell, hilarious), whose big number succinctly encapsulates her limited priorities in its title, “Sexy.” Karen’s walk alone is priceless. Regina, with the unerring instinct of a killer primate to spot a potential threat, zeroes in on pretty Cady as a plaything for her mind games. She invites her to sit at their table in the cafeteria, provided she adheres to…
The post ‘Mean Girls’: Theater Review appeared first on FeedBox.