Author: BEN BRANTLEY / Source: New York Times
Let me say up front that if I were asked to choose among the healthy lineup of girl-power musicals now exercising their lungs on Broadway, you would have to count me on Team Regina.
That’s a reference to the alpha leader of the nasty title characters of “Mean Girls,” the likable but seriously over-padded new show that opened at the August Wilson Theater on Sunday night.I hasten to add that I am in no way endorsing the crushing elitist behavior of Regina George, a teen clique queen embodied here with red- (or rather pink-) hot coolness by Taylor Louderman. I was once a public high school student myself, and writhed painfully beneath the long, glossy talons of many a Regina.
But the jokes, poses and put-downs that Regina delivers and inspires in others in this musical, adapted from the 2004 film, are a lot more entertaining than the more earnestly aspirational doings of the heroines of “Frozen,” “Anastasia” and, their deathless sorority founder, That’s because Regina and her frenemies converse in dialogue by the peerless comic writer Tina Fey.
The creator of the dearly departed television series “30 Rock,” “Saturday Night Live” alumna, sometime movie star and best-selling essayist, Ms. Fey has one of the most appealing satirical sensibilities on offer. Her wit is both caustic and polite, stinging and soothing at once, though it’s the sharpness that lingers afterward.
That perspective was transformed into box-office gold in the film “Mean Girls,” Ms. Fey’s first screenplay, based on a nonfiction book about the perils of popularity by Rosalind Wiseman and directed by Mark Waters. Starring a young Lindsay Lohan as an outsider who insinuates herself into a high school “in” crowd and loses her identity (a part ably assumed in the musical by Erika Henningsen), the film balanced every-nerd revenge fantasies with sunny life lessons, and it lives on as a mood-elevating cult favorite.
Fans of that movie will be happy to learn that Ms. Fey’s script for the protracted stage incarnation — which features songs by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin, with direction and choreography by Casey Nicholaw — retains many of the oft-quoted catchwords and quips of the original. When early in the show, a character hopefully says “fetch” (a neologism for really cool), the audience is chuckling before she lands that final “ch.”
As for me, I was laughing guiltily even before the show started, gazing at the onstage video wallpaper of annotated yearbook photographs. Representing the title characters’ so-called “Burn Book,” which figures in a crucial plot point, these are images of class portraits decorated with cruel phrases like “If cornflakes were a person” and “Only made…
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