Mean Girls – Savoy Theatre, London

Book: Tina Fey

Music: Jeff Richmond

Lyrics: Nell Benjamin

Director: Casey Nicholaw

When it came out in 2004, the movie Mean Girls was a welcome addition to the high school movie genre. It revolves around new girl Cady, a former home-schooled teenager without prior knowledge of the clique-based social hierarchies involved. She initially finds herself pitted against queen bee Regina George and her friends (the “Plastics”). Before long, she begins to enjoy their attention and the status that comes with it, and somewhat unintentionally ends up usurping Regina’s role and becoming that which she initially hated.

Part of the film’s appeal came from Tina Fey’s preternaturally acerbic script, which elevated everything around it and helped cement it as a beloved classic. This stage musical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in 2018, retains Fey on book-writing duties, ensuring that it both stays true to the film’s hilarity and offers punchier, more up-to-date references. There’s also a new framing device: Elena Skye’s Janis and Tom Xander’s Damian, who befriend Cady (Charlie Burn) in the story, do the same to the audience: the whole escapade is presented by them as a sort of lecture-cum-morality tale.

That opening is bold, brash, and with more of a splash of Broadway glitz. Xander, in particular, provides multiple splashes of performance magic, really capitalising on a character who is deemed “too gay to function” but is demonstrably quite the reverse.

The titular Mean Girls, meanwhile, also impress. Georgina Castle’s Regina doesn’t quite make the splash on entrance one would hope, but quickly becomes one of the show’s core strengths. Of her sidekicks, Elèna Gyasi provides depths to the insecure Gretchen, but it’s Grace Mouat’s fundamentally dumb Karen who stands out. The cliché of an incredibly stupid character has been done to death. Still, Mouat performs the role with such charm and comedic timing that she can overcome the predictability of the caricature.

Less successful is Burn’s central character. It is a fault of the musical that while Cady is the principal role, it is also the least interesting one. Neither the otherwise ship-smart book nor the more anodyne songs (written by Fey’s husband, Jeff Richmond, with lyrics by Nell Benjamin) let us understand the character’s thought processes in the way we can with the other characters.

This is particularly noticeable as Act II’s Cady, having finally snagged the boy of her dreams (Regina’s ex Aaron, played with winning charm by Daniel Bravo), proceeds to mess it all up. Within a single verse, the couple we are supposed to be rooting for has broken up, but there’s little sense of emotional angst involved. It feels more like a move that has to be played because that’s what the film did at that point, without awarding it the emotional heft that an original story would have given the same moment.

And that’s really the biggest flaw in Mean Girls: it allows the adoration of its source material to overwhelm its transition to the stage. While true to the film, a subplot about using weight gain as a means of demoralising and diminishing a character feels like something that might have been best left in the past. Elsewhere, characters and situations drop out and are reintroduced purely to please movie fans rather than service the musical.

Still, the slightly cartoonish elements result in a high school musical that is slicker and funnier than the thematically similar Heathers. But despite a book that retains much of the charm of the source material, Mean Girls is neither as smart nor as dumb as it believes itself to be.

Booking until 16 February 2025