Mean Girls, Savoy Theatre review — Tina Fey musical is plastic and a little bit fantastic

Rolling into London six years after its Broadway premiere, and 20 since the original film became cult watching, Mean Girls, Tina Fey’s peppy, funny musical about teen queens and vicious high-school rivalries, has been nippily updated since its original incarnation. Smartphones and social media offer so many more platforms for epic snarkiness, and Fey’s script reflects that, with gags about selfies and sexting. It could do more — it still feels very much of its era — but it is delivered with zinging energy and wit in Casey Nicholaw’s staging.

Presented as a cautionary tale, in a framework delivered by shrewd outcasts Damian (Tom Xander) and Janis (Elena Skye), the story begins with 16-year-old Cady Heron (Charlie Burn) leaving the lions and cheetahs of Kenya for the infinitely more vicious big cats and cheaters of North Shore High in Illinois.

Here she is acquainted all too quickly with the ruthless realities of survival of the fittest. Soon, smart Cady is playing dumb to try and attract handsome dude Aaron in the math class and, even more significantly, she has caught the eye and admiration of the all-powerful “Plastics”: perfect pink princess Regina George and her courtiers, Gretchen and Karen. But in a series of power moves that Shakespeare’s monarchs would admire, Regina stitches Cady up — only for Cady to retort by usurping Regina’s throne.

In a production that revels in the extremes of the teenage emotional landscape, all this plays out with finger-snapping speed. The Plastics arrive in the canteen with the sort of flourish generally reserved for nobility on a state visit, with Georgina Castle’s excellent Barbie-perfect Regina posed atop a table and framed by Grace Mouat’s sweetly dozy Karen and Elèna Gyasi’s hyper-anxious Gretchen.

Nicholaw’s choreography can be very droll — it incorporates canteen trays and a mobility scooter — and the framing device allows everything to be that extra bit OTT. There is a cracking cast, too, with each of the leads finding both facade and fragility. Burn’s gentle Cady convincingly demonstrates how appealing an in-crowd, even a toxic one, looks to an outsider, and Xander’s wonderfully funny Damian drives the plot along.

What holds it back is the music (Jeff Richmond), which varies in style to suit the characters but doesn’t leave much trace or match up to Fey’s zinger-loaded script. And there’s something just a little bit plastic about it all: beneath the smart observations, it doesn’t really go that deep. In the hands of an irresistible cast, it’s certainly fun — fetch, one might even say.

★★★☆☆

To February 16, meangirlsmusical.com