“Someone gets hurt.”
The modern version of the 20-year-old film Mean Girls was its Broadway musical version in 2018 but now is adapted by Tina Fey for a film musical. Although the recent film musical adaptation The Color Purple is successful, maybe not as much for Mean Girls. It’s “meaner” than its original because girls bullying other girls seems a whole lot tougher than long ago and therefore less pleasant. Anyway, both musicals have a deal more to do if they want to compete with the likes of Hairspray or Back to the Future!
In addition, the girls are now hyper-back-biting and postmodern in the sexual way that research shows girls currently reach puberty much earlier. These “mean girls” have busts the size of a mature woman’s promoted for eye appeal. At the requisite house party in parents’ absence, drinking and cavorting are easily achieved with nary a good soul warning that disaster could follow. In that regard, the new version is culturally accurate and depressing, meaner if you will.
As for the trash chic clothes, the pink could have come from Barbie rejects: “If you don’t dress slutty, that is slut-shaming us.” Barbie’s plastic pink is present. As for the current take on gays, Damian (Jaquel Spivey) makes the most florid display acceptable and even warm.
Cady (Angourie Rice) throws that party to connect with her crush, Aaron (Christopher Briney), an act she would never have thought of until she made the transition from home schooling to North Shore High School. Her mother admits Cady is learning things she could never have taught her including how to become mean by accepting overtures from the A-list clique of bad girls headed by Regina (Renee Rapp).
Cady’s metamorphosis from innocent to “Bitch” is the result of hanging with a brutal crowd that preys on naif’s like Cady, piercing the egos of anyone who is not hip or dares to challenge the mean-girls’ hegemony. In the end, all’s well as the usual lesson applies—be yourself. Mean Girls is mean enough but still enough to satisfy a longing for the pink plastic of the behemoth Barbie.