Review: 'Mean girls' sets the perils of being popular to song

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, “Wicked.” That’s because Regina and her frenemies converse in dialogue by 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, 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,” 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), the film balanced every-nerd revenge fantasies with sunny life lessons, and it lives on as a mood-elevating cult favorite.

Fans of that movie will be happy to learn that Fey’s script for the protracted stage incarnation — which features songs by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin, with direction and choreography by Casey Nicholaw — retains many of the oft-quoted catchwords and quips of the original. When early in the show, a character hopefully says “fetch” (a neologism for really cool), the audience is chuckling before she lands that final “ch.”

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’ “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 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’ 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 Fey’s sly take on adolescent social angst into crowd-pleasing song and dance. Richmond and Benjamin’s many (many) musical numbers are passable by middle-of-the-road Broadway standards (though Benjamin’s shoehorned rhymes do not bear close examination).

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 2 1/2 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: Louderman’s Regina, 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 Fey and Amy Poehler in the film).

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,” 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 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. 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.