Theatre in Review: Mean Girls (August Wilson Theatre)

	Kyle Selig. Erika Henningsen. Photo: Joan Marcus

The title characters of Mean Girls are no better than they should be, and so is the musical that they inhabit. Given the fan base of the 2004 film -- by Tina Fey -- on which it is based, the musical probably only needed to be passable to strike box office gold. And that's what Fey, who wrote the book, and her collaborators have delivered. Mean Girls is loud, fast, insistently chipper, and fitfully hilarious; it is also deficient in the qualities that make a musical memorable. I give it a C+.

Mean Girls is highly faithful to the film, an amusing and often deadly accurate anthropological guide to the high school jungle. I choose my words carefully: Cady, the heroine, has spent most her of young life in Kenya; when her biologist parents lose their funding and move back to suburban Chicago, she is thrilled, expecting, at long last, to take up the life of a typical teenager. Instead, she finds herself lost in a bewildering caste system in which the like-minded congregate in cliques, refusing to speak to anyone else. Clearly flailing, Cady is taken up by a pair of eternal outcasts: Janis, a punkish artist, and Damian, a pudgy gay kid whose main allegiance is to George Michael (a joke that would have benefited from updating). But they don't just befriend her, they engage her as a mole to invade the inner circle of Regina, head of "the plastics," a gang of girls with short skirts; big, overprocessed hair; and plenty of bad attitude. The plan works too well: Cady ends up as queen bee, becoming another Regina, endangering her chances with Aaron, a sweet-natured soccer player who has little use for poseurs.

Mean Girls has been carefully engineered to give the fans what they want, cueing ovations whenever their favorite lines are heard. ("Ex-boyfriends are off-limits to friends. That's just, like, the rules of feminism." "It's so fetch." "On Wednesdays we wear pink." You can get the last one on a T-shirt, part of the extensive line of merchandise available in the lobby.) The plot -- including the infamous bus accident that rudely, if amusingly, dispatches one of the characters -- has largely been retained. What freshness the show has to offer lies in the score and staging, both of which are proficient and less than likeable.

Shot mostly in medium and close-up takes, filled with delightful throwaway gags, and clocking in at ninety-seven minutes, Mean Girls, the film, is ideally proportioned for a comic tale of adolescent agony. At a running time of more than two and a half hours, paced by a series of high-pressure production numbers, and with every joke broadened to land squarely in the last row of the balcony, Mean Girls, the musical, has been inflated to the point of bursting. It's a harsh, hard-sell entertainment, sorely in need of a little charm.

Even the show's assets are turned into debits by repetition. It's a funny idea to introduce Regina and her acolytes with "Meet the Plastics," a brassily sinister number that sounds like a Sean Connery-era James Bond theme -- but all of Regina's numbers are written in the same style. Casey Nicholaw's musical staging is loaded with inventive touches, putting students up to sliding around on cafeteria trays and executing wild leaps off a sofa at a raucous party; using a set of desks on wheels (and with an assist from the video department), we are whipped through four separate class sessions in less than a minute. But songs and dances can, and should, do more than constantly hype a musical with ever-larger doses of vitamin B12. It isn't until halfway through the second act, when Cady and Aaron settle into a quiet -- and, in terms of the plot, consequential -- number, "More is Better," that the show takes a moment to catch its breath. It's also a moment of sweet relief from all the preceding noise and sound.

As Cady, a role that cued the ascent of Lindsay Lohan, Erika Henningsen has a disarming manner, and -- when she gets a chance to show it off -- a big, big voice. (Her first number, "It Roars," provides her with a real showcase; it also does a solid job of setting up her as the clueless outsider in this strange new environment.) But Cady is a tricky proposition; for most of the show, she is a puppet, her actions dictated by others, and as she backstabs and double-deals her way to the top of the high school food chain, she becomes harder and harder to like. Fey and her songwriters -- composer Jeff Richmond and lyricist Nell Benjamin -- haven't really given us the insights that would allow one to identify with her as she becomes enmeshed in a web of adolescent intrigue.

Henningsen also gets upstaged by most of the supporting cast. Taylor Louderman's Regina is a perfectly poised hellion, capable of destroying an enemy's life with a single shade-throwing remark. Louderman is such a powerful presence that, even in these overscaled proceedings, she can afford to underplay. Barrett Wilbert Weed, as Janis, and Grey Henson, as Damian, are such confident performers that they can't help but take over whenever they're around. More than once, I wondered what Mean Girls would have been like if they were the lead characters; after all, they narrate the story and set the plot in motion. (Late in the second act, when Cady is being held to account for the social chaos she has spawned, the show has nary a thought for the complicity of her co-conspirators.)

Many others make strong contributions, including Ashley Park as Regina's neediest follower, forever poised on the edge of a breakdown; Kate Rockwell, slaying repeatedly as another plastic, her head blissfully free of thought; Kerry Butler, amusing as always as both Cady's knowing calculus teacher (Fey's role in the film) and Regina's desperate-to-be-with-it mom; Kyle Selig, a most amiable dreamboat as Aaron; and Cheech Manohar as the head of the mathlete team, who works hard to infuse his nerdy enthusiasm with plenty of hip-hop style.

The production design is just right, with video designers Finn Ross and Adam Young filling the large, curved upstage screen with plenty of scene-setting imagery, a strategy that allows Scott Pask, the scenic designer, to fill out each location with remarkable economy. The video design earns laughs on its own: The preshow look is a collage of excerpts from Regina's "burn book," a yearbook annotated with savage comments on her fellow students, and, in one of the show's funniest moments, we see the social media barrage that follows hot on the heels of Regina's mortifying onstage wardrobe malfunction during a Christmas-themed talent show. Gregg Barnes' costumes find a clever identifying look for each group of kids; he also provides some smart individual touches, such as the artfully painted tuxes that Janis and Damian wear to the annual spring fling. Kenneth Posner's lighting paces the production numbers with his typical skill. Brian Ronan's big sound system is a marvel of clarity, but someone -- perhaps Nicholaw, who also directed -- decided that it needs to be cranked up to earsplitting levels. The show could be improved significantly by dialing it down a couple dozen decibels.

With its themes of female empowerment and authenticity, Mean Girls' heart is certainly in the right place -- its message is one that young audiences can't hear too often. The show improves markedly in its later stretches, with Janis taking the stage for the enjoyably self-assertive "I'd Rather Be Me," followed by "Do This Thing," in which the chastened Cady makes her debut as a mathlete, and "I See Stars," a lively, upbeat number set at the school's spring fling, in which everyone realizes that solidarity is better than ruthless social competition. If all of Mean Girls was this good, it would have been a must-see for all. As it is, it exists to give its existing fans a bigger, shinier, more expensive edition of what they already know they like. -- David Barbour