Mean Girls at Mirvish Productions
Photo by Jenny Anderson
If Mean Girls was a colour, it would be pink. But the wall of light that hits you when you walk into the Princess of Wales for the Mean Girls musical National Tour is white. Ceiling height video screens cover the stage, displaying pages from North Shore High School queen bee Regina George (Adriana Scalice)’s rumour-filled “Burn Book”.
During the show, these screens rotate through different video backgrounds — designed by Finn Ross and Adam Young — as the scene demands. Like the Wachowski Sisters’ 2008 cult hit Speed Racer, which features green screen backgrounds drawn in crayon, these video backgrounds are extremely digital, aggressively colourful, and look intentionally homemade — contrasting how expensive the screens must actually be.
These backgrounds batter the senses and overwhelm the stage picture, adding to the show’s sugar rush of energy. As a fan of garishly digital 2000s CGI — like Speed Racer, or the Star Wars prequels — these low-fi images excited me to no end; and though the show has been otherwise updated for the iPhone era, this approach ensures some 2000s gloss is kept in the mix.
Because the maximalist video design establishes location with ease, the rest of Scott Pask’s sets are fairly sparse, providing just enough furniture for the actors to have something to play with. Director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw — the underacknowledged force behind such hits as Book of Mormon, Something Rotten!, and Spamalot — fills this extra stage space with athletic choreography. Nicholaw’s heart lies in old timey musical comedy, so he does manage to sneak in a couple of tap numbers, but by and large he makes the Mean Girls ensemble more cheerleading team than showchoir.
Though there are a couple of unfocused group numbers, and “Fearless” does not make sense as an act one finale, the cast overall does impressive work with the overpacked score. On opening night, standby Adriana Scalice killed it as Regina, easily navigating the high-note infested role with a resonant pop star belt; she even added an extra high note at the end of “World Burn”. As Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith respectively, Jasmine Rogers and Morgan Ashley Bryant admirably complete the mean girl trio of “Plastics” that Regina leads.
Most of the show goes swimmingly — this touring production is, overall, a crisp and polished entertainment machine that I enjoyed immensely. But its conclusion struggles to match the rest of the show’s momentum. The last fifteen minutes are confusing; in a scene about a math competition, the show spreads its net much too wide: it tries to make math exciting, comment on sexism, resolve a romantic relationship, and prelude the show’s final song — a song, by the way, too sickly sweet to be earnest, but not, it seems, intentionally ironic.
But maybe musical adaptations of movies are just hard to conclude: Legally Blonde, another otherwise solid musical adaptation of an early 2000s film, also fails to stick its landing.
Script troubles aside, though, this production is unmissable on account of Nicholaw’s work. In fifty years, he will likely be considered among the best of Broadway director-choreographers; and while Mean Girls isn’t quite Something Rotten!, it’s no doubt worth seeing while it’s in town.