Mean Girls on Broadway is like a second draft of the movie — for better and worse

As the new musical Mean Girls premieres on Broadway — and racks up 12 Tony nominations in the process — it’s entering the not-quite-proud tradition of the screen-to-stage musical, with all the baggage that lineage entails.

There are plenty of musicals that have made the transition from stage to screen without losing their sterling reputations (West Side Story! Chicago!), but the shows that make the change the other way around — that start as movies without singing and then become stage musicals — have a much more fraught reputation.

For every underappreciated gem like Bring It On: The Musical (with music by a pre-Pulitzer Lin-Manuel Miranda and a post-Pulitzer Tom Kitt), there’s a flop like Breakfast at Tiffany’s (it ran four Broadway performances total and closed before it ever officially opened). For every giant moneymaker like Hairspray or The Lion King, there’s an also-ran like Catch Me If You Can or The Little Mermaid.

Mean Girls may not quite change that tradition. It’s a solid outing with great jokes, some catchy songs, and so-so lyrics. While a major success is within the realm of possibility here, it’s far from a sure thing.

Based on the 2004 movie written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan, Mean Girls comes to Broadway with a book written by Fey, music by her husband Jeff Richmond, lyrics by Nell Benjamin, and direction and choreography by Casey Nicholaw. It tells the story of Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen, likably blank), a Nice Girl who enters a public high school for the first time and falls under the spell of Queen Bee Regina George (Taylor Louderman, deliciously vicious). In the time it takes to do an onstage quick change out of a dorky Halloween zombie costume and into a miniskirt, Cady finds that she has become one of the titular Mean Girls.

It is in many ways exactly the story you remember from 14 years ago, but this time the iconic catchphrases are set to music: “Come sit with us tomorrow / It’ll be fetch!” sings Gretchen Weiner.

But in its new form, Mean Girls is also an excellent case study in the pitfalls and the advantages of the screen-to-stage musical as a genre. Here are two things that hold it back from being great — and the one thing it does really well.

Remember how funny “You go, Glen Coco” was in 2004? Don’t you want to hear it again with a slightly different delivery?

© 2018 Joan Marcus

A problem that all screen-to-stage musicals eventually run into is this: If a movie is iconic enough to get turned into a musical, chances are it has certain moments that fans in the audience will have memorized. So how do you adapt those moments in a way that’s true to the source material while also leaving the new stage musical room to do its own thing?

Some screen-to-stage musicals are able to translate their source’s most indelible moments from one medium to another, so that the stunning animation of the Lion King movie becomes the stunning puppet work of the Lion King stage show. Others choose to ignore those elements altogether. Bring It On: The Musical kept its source material’s focus on competitive cheerleading and a rivalry between white and black schools and ditched the rest, and was the stronger for it.

Mean Girls is most famous for its killer Tina Fey one-liners. And Fey, who wrote the book for the new musical, decided to preserve most of them in amber. That’s not a hugely successful choice.

In the best-case scenario, the show has to grind to a halt every time one of the movie’s most famous lines pops up to give the audience a chance to laugh and applaud while the cast winks and does a soft-shoe flourish: “Four for you, Glen Coco. You go, Glen Coco!” (Applause break.) “Oh, my god, Danny DeVito, I love your work!” (Applause break.) “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m @CoolMom!” (Okay, that one got updated for the social media generation. But did it need to be?)

In a worst-case scenario, the audience ends up hearing the original version of the quote echoing in their ears as they watch the musical, and that’s wildly unfair to the able new cast. Why does poor Louderman — who’s developed a fantastic character voice for Regina, part Valley Girl drawl and part growl — have to compete with my memory of Rachel McAdams’s manic fury on the line, “Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen”?

And when Henningsen and Kyle Selig, as Cady’s crush object Aaron Samuels, rush through a shoehorned-in, “Hey, what’s the date?” / “October 3rd,” it’s impossible to avoid thinking about how every year on October 3, Jonathan Bennett and Lindsay Lohan used to tweet those lines at each other but now Lohan has deleted all her old tweets, and how it’s really sad how she brought back her Twitter account for that depressing April Fool’s joke. Honestly, the whole thing is more of a downer than Cady and Aaron’s sweet torch ballad “Stupid With Love” needs.

Smushing a three-act story into a two-act structure always gets messy

© 2017 Joan Marcus

If you’ve ever seen The Lion King onstage, you might have experienced a brief and intense moment of confusion when the cast launches into “Hakuna Matata” and you still haven’t gotten to the act break. “Is there no intermission in this show?” I once saw an audience member mouth to her companion with horror as young Simba transformed into adult Simba onstage.

It’s a confusing sequence. The moment before Simba the lion cub goes into exile and meets Timon and Pumba feels like a natural break in the story, just the point for an intermission. When the show cheerily sails on past it, it can be disorienting.

That’s because The Lion King is structured for the movies, where the three-act structure reigns supreme. Simba’s exile feels like a natural act break because it is: It’s the end of the first act in the movie. His adventures with Timon and Pumbaa as they Hakuna Matata around form the second act of the movie, and his final battle with Scar is the third act.

But Broadway shows are almost always two-act shows, with just enough room for the audience members to stretch their legs and brave the line to the bathroom in the middle. You can only get away with two intermissions if you’re Shakespeare or Tony Kushner or something; it’s certainly nothing you want in a family-friendly extravaganza. So generally, when you bring a story from screen to stage, you have to massage its structure enough that there’s a natural breaking point halfway through.

Or you can pull a Lion King and just stick the act break halfway through the movie’s second act, more or less at random, which is pretty much what Mean Girls does.

The results aren’t horrible — as the success of The Lion King shows, you can absolutely have a successful play with a confusing structure — but they’re messy. There’s a certain shaggy clumsiness to Mean Girls around its midsection, when the structure of the movie is fighting the structure of the Broadway show, and it keeps the musical from working as cleanly and effectively as the movie did.

The best parts of Mean Girls are the parts that expand and improve on the movie

© 2018 Joan Marcus

While Fey’s involvement in the creation of this musical isn’t an unalloyed good, it does give Mean Girls one giant advantage: While some screen-to-stage musicals can feel like a weak copy of their source material, this feels like a second draft of the movie in all the best ways.

The characters are more thoroughly thought out, and their arcs are better developed. The nerdy glee that Cady takes in math gets plenty of room to breathe, and so does her anthropological study of Regina’s predatory ways. Karen gets a better running joke than her movie counterpart’s obsession with her psychic breasts. New parallels emerge between approval-hungry Gretchen and the hapless Mrs. George in a comic and surprisingly touching duet.

Part of that is because, at two and a half hours, the musical is a solid hour longer than the movie. But a lot of it is because of what musicals have to offer as a medium. A good musical theater song can take the audience deeply into a character’s mind, and it can make that character come thoroughly to life in a way no other medium can quite manage. It’s a feature that Mean Girls takes full advantage of.

Most impressively, the musical is willing to look at the structures that make girls mean, where the movie threw up its hands and declared the meanness of girls to be just fate or something. Where the movie laughed at its girls, the musical is willing to seek the systems that make them act out, and point its jokes in that direction instead.

That’s why, despite its minor flaws, Mean Girls has the potential to be one of the truly successful screen-to-stage musicals. And even if it doesn’t quite become a Broadway fixture like The Lion King, it’s already outlasted Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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