Mean Girls

[LoveNDino]

Please make it better than what is seen here...

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

It'll sell to a Broadway crowd, but it's like Legally Blonde without the fun wordplay.

 

Truly forgettable music. Very little set, mostly screens and projections.

[edjames]

Alas, the reviewers were not enthusiastic about this show. Alas, it is not on my list of shows I am interested in, however, given its subject matter and the association of Tina Fey, I'm sure it will find an audience of teenage girls...although I will admit that the photo with the football player looks intriguing! Kyle might have an unexpected stage door visitor! LOL

 

Here is "Mean Girl" critic Ben B of the NYTimes take on this show...

 

Review: ‘Mean Girls’ Sets the Perils of Being Popular to Song

MEAN GIRLS

 

By BEN BRANTLEY. APRIL 8, 2018

Let me say up front that if I were asked to choose among the healthy lineup of girl-power musicals now exercising their lungs on Broadway, you would have to count me on Team Regina. That’s a reference to the alpha leader of the nasty title characters of “Mean Girls,” the likable but seriously over-padded new show that opened at the August Wilson Theater on Sunday night.

 

I hasten to add that I am in no way endorsing the crushing elitist behavior of Regina George, a teen clique queen embodied here with red- (or rather pink-) hot coolness by Taylor Louderman. I was once a public high school student myself, and writhed painfully beneath the long, glossy talons of many a Regina.

 

But the jokes, poses and put-downs that Regina delivers and inspires in others in this musical, adapted from the 2004 film, are a lot more entertaining than the more earnestly aspirational doings of the heroines of “Frozen,” “Anastasia” and, their deathless sorority founder,

That’s because Regina and her frenemies converse in dialogue by the peerless comic writer Tina Fey.

 

The creator of the dearly departed television series “30 Rock,” “Saturday Night Live” alumna, sometime movie star and best-selling essayist, Ms. Fey the creator of the dearly departed television series “30 Rock,” “Saturday Night Live” alumna, sometime movie star and best-selling essayist, Ms. Fey has one of the most appealing satirical sensibilities on offer. Her wit is both caustic and polite, stinging and soothing at once, though it’s the sharpness that lingers afterward.

• That perspective was transformed into box-office gold in the film “Mean Girls,” Ms. Fey’s first screenplay, based on a nonfiction book about the perils of popularity by Rosalind Wiseman and directed by Mark Waters. Starring a young Lindsay Lohan as an outsider who insinuates herself into a high school “in” crowd and loses her identity (a part ably assumed in the musical by Erika Henningsen),
  fantasies with sunny life lessons, and it lives on as a mood-elevating cult favorite.
   
  As for me, I was laughing guiltily even before the show started, gazing at the onstage video wallpaper of annotated yearbook photographs. Representing the title characters’ so-called “Burn Book,” which figures in a crucial plot point, these are images of class portraits decorated with cruel phrases like “If cornflakes were a person” and “Only made the team because his mom slept with the coach.”
   
  That this “Mean Girls” takes place (still at an Illinois high school) 14 years later than the film has proved no obstacle to Ms. Fey. After all, social media only increases opportunities for social climbing and subversion.
   
  The disconnect that troubles this musical isn’t a matter of adapting to changing times. Scott Pask’s set, Gregg Barnes’s costumes and Finn Ross and Adam Young’s video designs render sociological exactitude with flat comic-strip brightness.
   
  No, the trouble lies in the less assured translation of Ms. Fey’s sly take on adolescent social angst into crowd-pleasing song and dance. Mr. Richmond and Ms. Benjamin’s many (many) musical numbers are passable by middle-of-the-road Broadway standards (though Ms. Benjamin’s shoehorned rhymes do not bear close examination.
  
  Kyle Selig with Ms. Louderman, one of the designer-garbed despots of the musical’s title.
  Yet they rarely capture either the tone or the time of being a certain age in a certain era. A couple of songs tip their caps to Katy Perry/Pink-style ballads of empowerment (“It Roars,” “Fearless”), but they lack the energizing pop snap you long for.
   
  A rap number, for a party sequence, is embarrassing, and not only because it’s intended to be. By the end, when the feuding students have learned the errors of their divergent ways, high-volume hymns of uplift have taken over. Only an occasional number — like “What’s Wrong With Me?,” a cri de coeur of insecurity, affectingly performed by Ashley Park — offers essential insights into character or truly propels the plot.
   
  These songs are why the show weighs in at two and a half hours, as opposed to the movie’s zippy 97 minutes. And often when I sensed that a character was feeling a song coming on, a grumpy voice in me murmured, “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t.”
   
  As long as they’re talking, the leading students of “Mean Girls” exude an idiosyncratic, carefully exaggerated comic charm. You have, on the one hand, the designer-garbed despots of the title: Ms. Louderman’s Regina, Ms. Park’s terminally insecure Gretchen and Kate Rockwell’s terminally stupid Karen.
   
  On the other, there are the “Freaks and Geeks” misfits: Grey Henson’s “almost too gay to function” Damian and Barrett Wilbert Weed’s deadpan goth-girl Janis. Kerry Butler is very funny as a variety of grown-ups (including parts portrayed by Ms. Fey and Amy Poehler in the film).
   
  
  Ms. Henningsen, left, with Kerry Butler, who is very funny portraying a variety of the show’s grown-ups.
   
  Ms. Henningsen’s Cady, the new girl (she was home-schooled in Kenya by her parents), is less specifically defined, but she has plenty of presence. Her radiant, confused blankness effectively summons memories of being young, unformed and desperate to be liked.
   
  The show itself suffers from a similar indecisiveness, especially in its structure. It employs two separate, fitfully used framing perspectives — that of Damian and Janis as droll narrators and commentators on the action, and of Cady, who grew up in the wilds of Kenya, and sometimes observes her fellow students as if they were zoological specimens. At some point, a choice between these two should have been made.
   
  As he demonstrated in “The Book of Mormon” and “The Drowsy Chaperone,” Mr. Nicholaw specializes in spoof choreography that both celebrates and satirizes Broadway dance conventions. It’s an approach that feels only intermittently appropriate here.
   
  He does an amusing, if underdeveloped, riff on “The Lion King” and borrows from “Mormon” for the production’s showstopper, a tap sequence called, uh, “Stop.” The wittiest musical moments include a Halloween-party number in which young women defend tarty costumes as emblems of feminist independence.
   
  And I have to admit I had a great time whenever Ms. Louderman’s Regina strutted her calculating, vampy stuff in songs of malicious intent. Not that I would ever root for the dastardly Regina, with her plastic values and vicious whims. On the other hand, there’s a reason the show is called “Mean Girls.”
   
  They’re the next-door versions of those cosmetically perfect pop and movie stars whose public vanities and follies we savor with such glee. Ms. Fey is an ace student of this universal prurience. She’s also smart enough to let us wallow in and renounce it at the same time.
   
  

[edjames]

New York Post wasn't overly thrilled either...

 

How Tina Fey messed up ‘Mean Girls’ musical

By Sara Stewart

2 stars

April 8, 2018 | 10:01pm |

 

 

Mean should never feel this warm and fuzzy.

 

Tina Fey’s musical opened on Broadway Sunday night, in a high-budget but watered-down adaptation of her wonderfully nasty, 2004 hit comedy. This is “Mean Girls” lite.

 

Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, the musical starts on a high note, with stage-wall projections of the infamous Burn Book’s slams — “I suck in all ways,” “Can’t contour for s - - t.” A likably daffy Erika Henningsen gets out from under the long shadow cast by the teenage Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron, transported from the Kenyan savannah, where she was homeschooled, to suburban Chicago.

 

Once there, she’s thrown into a different wild kingdom — high school, where a clique known as the Plastics reigns supreme. Narrating the action is the outsider duo of Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed, who makes an excellently sardonic Goth girl) and the “almost too gay to function” Damian (a droll Grey Henson), who befriend Cady and goad her into going undercover to undo the Plastics’ queen bee.

 

Here’s the thing: As off-Broadway’s “Heathers” proved, it’s tough to transfer a big-screen bitch onto the stage. As Regina George, Taylor Louderman can really belt, stomping around on a cafeteria table in tight white denim announcing she’s a “massive deal.” But she comes across as less cruel nightmare, more future reality-show star. As her wingwomen, Ashley Park’s Gretchen Wieners is a fluttery mass of insecurity, while Kate Rockwell’s Karen Smith is still dumb as rocks but not as overtly laughable; here, thanks to Fey’s updated book about the hazards of social media, Karen’s a sexting victim.

 

“Mean Girls” fans will love hearing their favorite lines, from “On Wednesdays we wear pink” to “Stop trying to make ‘Fetch’ happen!” and “You go, Glen Coco!” To their credit, Fey, her composer-husband Jeff Richmond and lyricist Nell Benjamin have resisted crafting these into shameless musical numbers (though I’d have liked to see Coco get his moment in the spotlight). But many of the songs feel like padding, including an uninspired ballad (“More Is Better”) between Cady and her love interest, Aaron (Kyle Selig).

 

“Mean Girls” the musical is best when it breaks from the movie. Damian amps up the energy in the room with a tap-dancing ode to the perils of smartphone addiction (“Stop”), and another song, “Apex Predator,” links Cady’s zoologist past to the primal rites of high school.

 

In this post-“13 Reasons Why” world, some of Fey’s script changes are for the better. The film’s racially branded social groups are exchanged for monikers like “Woke Seniors,” and there are far fewer mentions of “sluts” and “whores.” Fey still finds her way to the core of the story.

 

“Calling someone ugly doesn’t make you better looking,” says math teacher Ms. Norbury (Kerry Butler, doing a credible Fey imitation). “We have to stop beating each other up over every little thing, ’cause meanwhile men are running around grabbing butts and shooting everybody!”

 

But let’s be real: Fey is at her funniest when she’s brutally cutting, and songs like Getchen’s lament, “What’s Wrong With Me?,” and Karen’s PG-rated ode to racy Halloween costumes (“Sexy”) fall far short of the so-real-it’s-painful zingers from her film.

 

Fey’s show has heart, but it’s not terribly fetch.

[TruthBTold]

Alas, the reviewers were not enthusiastic about this show. Alas, it is not on my list of shows I am interested in, however, given its subject matter and the association of Tina Fey, I'm sure it will find an audience of teenage girls...although I will admit that the photo with the football player looks intriguing! Kyle might have an unexpected stage door visitor! LOL

 

Here is "Mean Girl" critic Ben B of the NYTimes take on this show...

 

Review: ‘Mean Girls’ Sets the Perils of Being Popular to Song

MEAN GIRLS

 

By BEN BRANTLEY. APRIL 8, 2018

Let me say up front that if I were asked to choose among the healthy lineup of girl-power musicals now exercising their lungs on Broadway, you would have to count me on Team Regina. That’s a reference to the alpha leader of the nasty title characters of “Mean Girls,” the likable but seriously over-padded new show that opened at the August Wilson Theater on Sunday night. . . . .

• . . . .
  

 

Would I put up the B'way money to get this sight? Nah!