The Longest Advertisement for a Broadway Musical – ‘Mean Girls’ (2024) Review

Let’s set the stage properly because none of the trailers have managed to do so. As much as I adore Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS album, besides the fact that “Get Him Back” has very little narrative connection to the plot of Mean Girls, the fact remains that absolutely no pop hit is featured in the show. And this is because all of the musical backing for the movie was already intrinsically baked in. For you see, even though none of the advertisements ever admitted it, Mean Girls (2024) is an adaptation of the Broadway musical adaption of the 2004 movie (which itself also turned out to be adapted on book, but we don’t need to go far back to note how inane this is). And outside of a musical note hidden in the A of the title card, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re walking into a modernization of the original, which in some ways it is, but in many more ways, it’s really not. But before I can even talk about Mean Girls (2024), I have to talk about Mean Girls (2004), the collective of Tina Fey’s filmography, my own background as a musical theater kid, and two other musical movies I’ve seen in the month in order to lay the foundation for my critique, so we got a lot of ground to cover.

The original Mean Girls is a touchstone of early 2000s teen comedy. A veritable fountain of memes between “stop trying to make fetch happen” and the “It’s October 3rd,” the Lindsay Lohan led comedy was funny, fast paced, and memorable. It’s quick wit a…