Review: MEAN GIRLS at Wharton Center is a Witty, Sharp Musical With a Powerful Message

So fetch! Broadway's Mean Girls is at Wharton Center in East Lansing until this Sunday, March 6th. Based on the 2004 movie, Mean Girls premiered on Broadway back in 2018 and it went on to be nominated for 12 Tony Awards.

The story of Mean Girls is as follows: Cady Heron is a teenager living with Kenya with her parents, until they need to move back stateside. Cady starts going to North Shore High, a school in suburban Chicago. During her fish out of water experience at North Shore, Cady is befriended by a pair of art nerds and popular girls simultaneously. She soon is thrust into a scheme to overthrow the queen bee while still remaining "friends" with her, and this very scheme fundamentally changes everything about Cady and the rest of the school.

If you were active in online communities in the mid-2000s to early 2010s, you probably came across more memes and quotes from the Mean Girls movie than you can count (e.g., "The limit does not exist," "Stop trying to make fetch happen, it's not going to happen," "I'm not a regular mom, I'm a cool mom," just to name a couple). The fact that it is such a quotable movie could've put a lot of pressure on the musical to be identical to the source material in order to appease fans of the film. That said, the musical doesn't feel heavy-handed at all. It honors the cult classic by including some of the favorite lines and the aforementioned memes, but it doesn't go overboard. The musical is its own entity and that's the best thing you can ask of a musical based on a popular movie.

One of the most successful aspects to Mean Girls is the way they utilize technology to further develop the various settings of the show. The show relies largely on these giant screens lining the back of the stage. Though this may sound like a cop-out to some, with the way these screens look, you would never know that you weren't in Kenya, a fictionalized suburban mall, or North Shore High. The graphics are extremely well done and truly a great example of how far theatre has come in the last few years. It's particularly neat to see how the physical set pieces (e.g., desks, bedroom sets, bathroom stalls, lunch tables, etc.) go along with the virtual backgrounds.

When it comes to the onstage talent, it's evident that the cast knows their characters well. They make them their own, to the point where they're not remotely caricatures of their movie counterparts. This helps to further differentiate the musical from the film it was based on.

Further, many of the main cast members have their own standout moments (and in most cases, some have multiple). Particular favorites include: Janis's "I'd Rather Be Me" (sung by Mary Kate Morrissey), Regina's "World Burn" (sung by Nadina Hassan), Karen's "Sexy" (sung by Jonalyn Saxer), Damian's "Stop" (sung by Eric Huffman), Gretchen's "What's Wrong With Me?" (normally sung by Megan Masako Haley, but performed admirably by understudy Olivia Renteria on day one at Wharton), and Cady's act one closer "Fearless" (sung by Danielle Wade).

Written by Tina Fey, the original screenwriter of the movie, Mean Girls is a witty, sharp musical with a catchy score and an important message - in trying to belong, don't lose what makes you special. It's an undeniably powerful takeaway wrapped up in the guise of a "pink and fantastical" musical (to quote Danielle Wade) that everyone can certainly relate to in one way or another.

And isn't that what theatre is all about?

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Tickets for Mean Girls are on sale now at Wharton Center's official ticketing outlets: online at whartoncenter.com, at the Auto-Owners Insurance Ticket Office at Wharton Center, or by calling 1-800-WHARTON.

Connect with Mean Girls on Twitter at @meangirlsbway, on Instagram at @meangirlsbway and @changeisfetch, on Facebook at @MeanGirlsBway, and at meangirlsonbroadway.com.

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