It all started when writer and actor Tina Fey picked up a copy of “Queen Bees & Wannabes,” Rosalind Wiseman’s guide for parents of teenage girls, which offered advice on how to help daughters navigate the pressures of high school. Fey saw in it the seeds of satire, so she wrote a screenplay that became “Mean Girls,” a big hit when it came out in 2004.
Late last decade, Fey and her composer husband, Jeff Richmond, adapted it into a Broadway musical, and a touring production is spending the week in St. Paul at the Ordway Music Theater. Judging from the volume of pink clothing (a key element in the film) and the relatively youthful audience at Tuesday’s opening night, this show may provide the sense of belonging that the characters seek in “Mean Girls.” But I found myself wondering if this was particularly healthy.
For perhaps the winking sense that this is a send-up has been lost somewhere along the way. If you build a show around stereotypes and tropes, when do audiences start seeing reality through that lens and placing kids in categories just as rigid and confining as what’s portrayed in “Mean Girls”? In other words, when does life start imitating art?
Granted, “Mean Girls” makes clear that this is “A Cautionary Tale” that’s intended as a warning about the behavior in which our protagonist, Cady, engages. Fresh from being home-schooled on the Serengeti, she enters a suburban Chicago high school and finds that the law of the jungle rules. She soon gets caught up in cliques, crushes, betrayals and other traditional teenage rites of passage, including the cliche of a climactic competition.
And there’s much to recommend this production, which features some strong voices, fine characterizations and eye-catching choreography (even if most of it is variations on the same limited movement vocabulary). And the eight-piece band does fine things with Richmond’s score, which, alas, is similarly unvarying in style and structure.
Cast members of “Mean Girls,” the touring Broadway musical playing at the Ordway. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel / Courtesy of The Ordway)
Perhaps the best thing about “Mean Girls” is Fey’s clever script and the witty lyrics of Nell Benjamin. But I can’t say for sure because the sound was so muddy on opening night that I felt as if I missed fully half of what was said and sung. And maybe the performers are at a point in the tour when the whole enterprise has become wearying, for Tuesday’s performance lacked the spark of youthful energy needed to sell a high school musical, save for the bouncy hip-hop fest that is the party anthem, “Whose House in This?”.
That’s one of the lone memorable songs. “Apex Predator” should be one of them, but it came off as more dirge than driving rocker, while “Where Do You Belong?” and “Stop” are enjoyable but incongruous throwbacks to vintage musicals.
For a show about asserting dominance, it’s interesting that this production’s most memorable performances come from secondary characters, such as the queen bee Regina’s support network of girls consumed with insecurity (Kristen Amanda Smith) and clinging to the vacuous stereotype of the dumb blonde, but nevertheless making her likable (MaryRose Brendel). And Kristen Seggio deserves props for pulling triple duty as two mothers and the empowering math teacher who helps Cady find new purpose.
‘Mean Girls’
When: 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sun.
Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $160-$45, available at 651-224-4222 or ordway.org
Capsule: Muddy sound and low energy bring down what could be a sparkling satire.
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