I’ll tell you what’s fetch: Tina Fey’s writing. With the original ‘Mean Girls’ film 20 years old, ‘30 Rock’ having wrapped up over a decade ago and even ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ now a receding memory, it’s easy to forget how funny this woman was at her zenith - if I were to ballpark it I’d say that she accounted for about 75 percent of the joy the average millennial liberal felt in our otherwise-joyless twenties.
I will admit that I didn’t see the 2024 ‘Mean Girls’ film, which simultaneously served as a contemporary remake of the cult classic original, and a screen adaptation of the musical adaptation that was first seen in the US in 2017.
But the ‘Mean Girls’ stage musical that finally arrived in London in 2024 is very, very funny. And it’s not because it’s a nostalgic evocation of the film, which follows naive homeschooled teen Cady Heron as she’s thrust into a clique-riddled Illinois high school, with hilarious results. It’s because Fey has straight up rewritten lots of the jokes and she’s done a spectacular job, her characters riffing away merrily on everything from air fryers and Ozempic to the Dali Lama's tongue-sucking incident. There’s an effortless funniness to her acerbic, surreal, pop-culture infused dialogue, a real sense of ‘oh yeah, Tina Fey is a genius isn’t she?’
Unfortunately she isn’t a songwriting genius, and here’s where ‘Mean Girls’ comes unstuck. The songs – with music by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin – are not funny. They occasionally raise a smile: the lairy ‘Whose House is This?’ has some of the frat, crackle and pop of early Beastie Boys. But Benjamin’s words are, for the most part, a sea of beige pleasantness next to Fey’s vivid audacity. Moreover, they sentimentalise her acerbic vision: ‘Mean Girls’ isn’t as nihilistic as ‘30 Rock’, but it’s still caustic as teen movies go. The trad stylings of the songs serve only to pedestrianise it.
Still, director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw’s production is a lot of fun. Scott Pask, Finn Ross and Adam Young’s zippy projected sets are nice, able to transition from a classroom to a weird George Michael fantasy in the blink of an eye. The costumes, by Katrina Lindsay, are gratifyingly numerous and eye popping. And there are lots of standout performances: Georgina Castle is wonderfully malevolent as the Barbie-proportioned leader of popular-girl clique The Plastics; Grace Mouat is an absolute scene-stealer as Regina’s dumb-as-rocks underling Karen; Tom Xanderis a hoot as Cady’s self-described ‘too gay to live’ BFF Damian.
As Cady, Charlie Burn doesn’t entirely convince: she has a lovely singing voice, but she’s not got great comic chops. I hesitate to say ‘she’s no Lindsay Lohan’, but there was an appreciable barminess that Lohan – the OG Cady – brought to the role that’s not at all present here.
Ultimately ‘Mean Girls’ is a lot of fun, and I can absolutely see that there’s an audience out there that will enjoy the mix of jet-black gags and sugary songs more than I did. I came away entertained but frustrated - this is a funnier show than ‘Book of Mormon’, with a book that rivals ‘Hamilton’ for wit… and yet as a musical it’s not in the same league as either of them. The bottom line is that Fey is a comic genius who doesn’t actually write songs - and in the final analysis that’s a problem when it comes to trying to make a ‘Mean Girls’ musical happen.
