The Plastics are back, and they’re craving adoration and style points on their way to social domination. But the world may just be set right in the end for these “Mean Girls,” with an unexpected immigrant as the catalyst.
The Tina Fey-penned musical that evolved from Mark Waters’ 2004 film had its effervescent and bubbly Broadway tour return Tuesday to Minnesota, this time at St. Paul’s Ordway Center.
Casey Nicholaw’s original production has been recreated with tweaks and updates by director Casey Hushion and choreographer John MacInnis. The show still has a zillion costume changes, endless dances and wisecracks galore.
But some of the tech references are closer to today than to two decades ago. Even so, “Girls” has become a sociological document, with its use of the slang “fetch,” for example, clearly passé.
An entertaining spectacle composed by Fey’s husband Jeff Redmond, and with lyrics by Nell Benjamin, “Girls” is eerily resonant as a social experiment.
Let’s say you live in a social order ruled by a lying, vindictive and capricious overlord. If you had a chance to change things up in this dystopia, would you simply replace the leader with someone you think is more benign, or would you try to change the system altogether to make it bully- and clique-proof?
That’s a dilemma that our oblivious heroine Cady Heron (Katie Yeomans) confronts. Homeschooled in Kenya, where she lived in a safari utopia with only animals for friends (really, Tina Fey?), Cady is dropped into North Shore High School in suburban Chicago at 16, unsocialized and unready for this new world.
But she quickly recognizes that the social rules of an American high school are very much like what she observed among the fauna in Africa. Everyone kowtows to apex predator Regina George (Maya Petropoulos) and her loathed but envied Plastics clique — dumb blonde Karen Smith (MaryRose Brendel)and desperately insecure Gretchen Wieners (Kristen Amanda Smith).
