![Mean Girls the Musical: Making Fetch Happen](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/06/27/TELEMMGLPICT000383423999_17195011183920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqT_O5gpLeUS-wx2SQB-pJqqKt-zzPDmSI0lAI5OokJLI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Mean Girls the Musical, Savoy Theatre: The Broadway hit provides a welcome splash of summer fizz
This snarky adaptation of the hit 2004 film never allows a dull minute, even if its general thrust is cosily predictable
![Mean Girls the Musical: Making Fetch Happen](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/06/27/TELEMMGLPICT000383423999_17195011183920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqT_O5gpLeUS-wx2SQB-pJqqKt-zzPDmSI0lAI5OokJLI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Not another flipping musical! Walk down Aldwych and along the Strand and you’re spoilt rotten for song-fests. Now, at the Savoy comes Mean Girls, the stage adaptation of the hit 2004 film centred on female high-schoolers whose raison d’être is getting noticed and being cool but who need to discover a more meaningful existence.
David Hare has dared to describe musicals as “the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path”. Perhaps that’s putting it too strongly. Still, the straight play in the West End seems to be withering.
How, that said, can I justify cheering on Mean Girls? Set beside a recent musical visitor to the Savoy like Sunset Boulevard, it is mere chaff; the songs (by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin) are catchy yet forgettable. But just as there was a winning comic zest to the film (scripted by Tina Fey), so this spin-off (which spawned a film itself) has a rare combination of warmth, goofiness, snarky wit and perceptiveness. Tweaked for London, the superbly well-cast production, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, never allows a dull minute even if its general thrust is cosily predictable.
My stamp of approval comes partly endorsed (and enforced) by my Gen Z companion (daughter, late teens, and a fan). But the bottom line is that the show rocked on Broadway in 2018 (even if later felled by Covid) because, unlike its brittle protagonists, it has a sure sense of itself – sending up earnestness while being alert to claws-out peer pressure.
Discreet maths-wiz heroine, Cady, arrives at her narrow-horizoned Illinois high-school from a (relatively sheltered, home-tutored) stint in Kenya; this enables some pastiche Lion King frolics, not just in an opening mock-anthemic number (“It Roars”) but the later spoofy delineation of social hierarchies in animalistic terms (“Apex Predator”).
![No mean feat: Summer froth, but with a sting](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/06/27/TELEMMGLPICT000383424033_17195019345790_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Cady’s journey from gauche outsider to arch-rival of Regina, resident “Queen Bee” (and leader of the “Plastics”), is presented as a cautionary tale by two of Cady’s swiftly sidelined boho buddies: Elena Skye’s Janis and Tom Xander’s Damian, the latter a twinkling hoot as he hoofs it up in a Broadway-style showstopper (complete with swished canteen-trays).
Along the way, we get a critique of phoney female empowerment, as Charlie Burn’s initially agreeable Cady emulates the hands-on-hips hauteur of Georgina Castle’s icy Regina (whose barbs include the noted, slang-controlling reprimand, “Stop trying to make ‘Fetch’ happen”); Cady’s zeal to fit in irks the hunky love-interest Aaron (Daniel Bravo).
The cracks in the facades of Regina’s entourage are resonantly relayed, too: groupie-minded Gretchen (Elena Gyasi) sounds out her bubbling insecurities (“What’s Wrong with Me?”) while gormless Karen (Grace Mouat) lets slip the strains of conformity in the surface upbeat Sexy (“This is modern feminism talking/ I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in”). Such material won’t awards for Sondheimian subtlety, but it still connects to our modern goldfish-bowl world of constant social expectation and demand. Summer froth, perhaps, but with a sting; a loud show that’s surplus to requirements yet in its way quietly necessary.
Booking until Feb 16; london.meangirlsmusical.com