After a decade-long wait, the Plastics are on their way back as Mean Girls is coming to Broadway!
The 2004 film marked Tina Fey’s screenwriting debut and immediately became a cult classic. Now, Mean Girls has found second life as a musical, premiering in Washington D.C. this October 31 for a try-out run before coming to Broadway.
Fey began working on the musical adaptation 5 years ago with composer husband, Jeff Richmond. It was actually Richmond who suggested that Mean Girls could really work as a musical. Fey put her trust in him and began adapting her script for the stage.
Taking Lindsay Lohan’s role Cady Heron as the naïve homeschooler turned plastic is Erika Henningsen. Barrett Wilbert Weed and Grey Henson will play Cady’s friendly guides, Janis and Damian. The Mean Girls themselves are a trio of Broadway veterans: Taylor Louderman playing Regina George, Kate Rockwell as Karen Smith, and Ashley Park as Gretchen Wieners.
Fey spoke of the musical’s casting saying “[i]t’s similar to the experience I had with the movie, where you watch someone like Rachel McAdams and you think, ‘Oh, she made this. She’s such a great talent that she’s actually making this more than is on the page’. When you have great actors, like we do now with these young women, they bring more to it than you even imagined.”
In the writing process, Fey revisited the source material she used for the movie: Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees & Wannabes, a self-help book for worried parents and their teenage daughters.
“I tried to remember to stay at the core humanity of it, which is the behavior that comes out of all of us sometimes out of jealousy or fear,” Fey explained. “The great thing about music is it lets you get in people’s heads and inside their emotional lives in a way that you can do with a tight close-up in movies… I think fans will hopefully find that this has the DNA of the movie and is true to the spirit of it, but is also opened up in a lot of ways.”
