Clueless
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...