Amy Heckerling’s cult 1995 comedy Clueless feels a bit overshadowed by the funnier (but less nuanced) Mean Girls, which came a few years later and more aggressively staked its claim to the same post-John Hughes, high-school-as-a-jokey-microcosm-of-life turf.
So it’s not surprising that Mean Girls was first in there with a musical adaption, currently fetching away over at the Savoy Theatre.
But finally, here’s Clueless, which like Mean Girls is adapted by its original screenwriter, a sign of a labour of love if ever there was one. Despite other major successes, Heckerling is not the name Tina Fey is, and her stage update is nothing like as coruscatingly funny as Fey’s. But she makes a strong case for the enduring appeal of Clueless, her slyly clever valley-girl revamp of Jane Austen’s Emma. And unlike Fey she hasn’t roped her less talented husband in to write a load of unfunny songs that don’t really go with the rest of it.
The songs are in fact co-written by Broadway royalty lyricist Glenn Slater and ‘00s Scottish pop star KT Tunstall – an odd choice to translate the adventures of perky LA schoolgirl Cher Horowitz, but certainly not a bad choice as it turns out.
The slightly random deployment of Tunstall does, however, feel emblematic of a frustrating vagueness at the heart of the Rachel Kavanaugh-directed Anglo-American production. It never feels as Californian as the film, and doesn’t quite know whether to play up its ‘90s setting or shrug it off. Tunstall’s tunes broadly go for ‘a bit of everything’ rather than committing to a specific vision. But at best it really works – the grunge pop of Human Barbies and the faux boyband jam Reasonable Doubts pastiche the styles of the decade nicely.
And wittily too: Slater’s lyrics often add something genuinely substantive to the characters, particularly Emma Flynn’s Cher. A sunny, guileless and eye-wateringly privileged 17-year-old, she is, nonetheless, a surprisingly complicated character (well, surprising if you’ve not read Emma). Having lost her mother at an early age and been forced to run her household while her hotshot lawyer dad is busy hotshot lawyering, she has developed a pathological need to micromanage everyone around her in an effort to keep them happy at all times - a well-meaning but clearly toxic trait that her dad’s ex-wife’s hot son Josh (Keelan McAuley) dissects in Human Barbies.
The role of Cher will always be associated with Alicia Silverstone, who was so good in the film that it kind of overshadowed the entire rest of her career. Perky US actress Flynn inevitably can’t top Silverstone, but it’s not quite the same role. Yes, she has a lot of the same lines and outfits, but there’s a subtle level of fourth-wall breaking that changes the texture of the part and gives Flynn room to make it her own. She has a winning sense of conspiratorialism as she addresses, cajoles, sulks and pleads with us while she goes about her self-inflictedly over-complicated life. It is, on the whole, a lovely turn that captures Cher’s charm and unexpected depths.
Clueless is an amiable show that falls a little short of its potential. I wonder if more US creatives and a little more money generally might have mitigated its slight sense of weightlessness – it never really feels like ‘90s LA, and I imagine it would be stronger if it did. Where the Mean Girls musical is happy to rip up the original story, you sense Heckerling et al seem shy about getting stuck in. Which is fair enough: Clueless is great and never quite got its due, while Cher is a wonderful lead character; you don’t want to change things for the sake of it. But without a bit more boldness it’s unrealistic to expect it to be a bigger hit than the film itself. Still, why overthink it? It’s a witty, charming musical that winningly celebrates a great film and even better book.
