Review: MEAN GIRLS is “Blowing Up” at City Springs Theatre Company

City Springs Theatre Company is closing out its eighth season with MEAN GIRLS. The musical is based on the 2003 millennial-favorite movie (of the same name) written by Tina Fey.

The musical debuted on Broadway in 2018 and played over 800 performances before it closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tina Fey was involved in the book creation, with lyrics by Nell Benjamin and music by Jeff Richmond.

There are some slight differences from the movie (and a lot of missing details), but the musical still follows Cady Heron, the new girl at North Shore High School. Cady has just moved from Kenya and is new to socialization and schooling. She encounters Damian and Janice who help her find her way. Cady is also entranced by The Plastics (Regina, Gretchen, and Karen). After an embarrassment the night of Halloween, Damien and Janice convince Cady to make Regina’s life a little less comfortable. It all culminates at the spring fling dance. 

One of the more pragmatic decisions City Springs Theatre Company was able to rent the national tour’s set. The design is precisely what a production of MEAN GIRLS requires. It’s bright, bold, and unapologetically contemporary. More importantly, the set functions with commendable efficiency. Scene transitions are swift and purposeful, maintaining the production’s momentum rather than stalling it. In a musical that moves with the velocity of a viral rumor through a high school hallway, this is no small feat. 

Elle May Patterson’s choreography helped take this production up a notch. The ensemble is exceptional. This group of CSTC alumni bring talent and collective energy to elevate every dance number. Additionally, the combination of Patterson’s choreography with Anthony C. Daniel’s staging is inventive and spatially intelligent, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the sequences involving the school’s lunch tables and classroom desks.

Rather than treating the furniture as static set dressing, the team deploy it as an active element of the staging, creating kinetic layers of movement that communicate the social geography of high school with wit and precision. 

For many of the leading actors in this production, it was their first CSTC production. (Congratulations on your debuts!) That collective newness carries with it a certain rough energy; a tendency, in some instances, toward overstatement that occasionally reads as overacting rather than stylization. While MEAN GIRLS invites a degree of heightened performance, the line between intentional camp and unearned excess is a fine one, and not every member of the cast locates it with equal reliability. What the ensemble lacks in dramatic nuance, however, it more than compensates for in vocal strength. The collective singing in this production is, across the board, impressive and memorable.

Leading the company is Adagia Rueda as Cady Heron, and she is a genuinely compelling presence from the moment she sets foot on stage. Rueda possesses a voice designed for the Broadway stage, one that seems to cost her nothing, even in moments of considerable vocal demand. More than that, she brings an innate likeability to Cady that grounds the production’s more farcical elements. She is the emotional anchor this kind of show requires, and she easily brought the halls of NSHS together in the end.

Landry Champlin takes on the formidable task of embodying Regina George, and she arrives with the vocal authority the role demands. Champlin is well-suited to Regina’s musical moments, and she commands the stage with an assured physicality. Where the performance leaves room to grow is in the subtler registers of the face and eyes: the quiet cruelty, the calculated glance, the microexpressions that distinguish a truly chilling Regina from a merely loud one. 

The production’s most well-rounded performance belongs to Terica Marie as Janis Sarkisian. Marie brings something rare to the role: a quality of effortless, lived-in specificity that makes Janis feel like a complete human being rather than a theatrical construct. Her voice is phenomenal (rich, distinctive, and deployed with real intelligence), but it is her dramatic instincts that set her apart. Where other performances in this production occasionally shade toward the excessive, Marie finds Janis’s complexity without sacrificing her edge. 

Cole Fletcher as Damian Hubbard brings a genuinely impressive vocal instrument to one of the musical’s most beloved roles. Fletcher’s voice is a clear asset, capable of real warmth, surprises, and comic timing in equal measure. The challenge, at this point in the run, is one of calibration: Damian is a character who operates at a heightened frequency, and Fletcher occasionally pushes past that frequency into territory that reads as effortful rather than effortless. The raw material is undeniably there; what the performance needs is permission to trust itself a little more.

What the production does best is remind us why MEAN GIRLS works as a musical: at its core, beneath the pink and the plastics and the perfectly-timed comic cruelty, it is a story about the cost of self-betrayal and the difficulty of belonging. When this cast connects to that story, the production truly shines. You can tell this cast and crew connected both onstage and off, delivering a fun experience for all. 

MEAN GIRLS is onstage at the Byers Theatre through May 17, 2026. Purchase tickets at CitySpringsTheatre.com. Just remember: on Wednesdays, we wear pink.

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