A rather naughty high school musical

Tina Fey’s ‘Mean Girls’ mines the funny in a cut-throat clique

Another in the ever-growing list of movies-to-musicals, this Tina Fey confection is based on her 2004 film — a celebration of shallowness so over the top that you can’t help but feel sorry for the characters even as they stomp on all those around them.

Fresh off the boat from Kenya where she grew up, Cady (English Bernhardt) goes from being home-schooled on the savanna to getting thrown into an even more treacherous lion’s den in her new high school near Chicago. There, she runs into “The Plastics” — a trio of girls comprised of a sweet dimwit (Karen), a wealthy neurotic (Gretchen) and the nasty leader of the trio, Regina.

Rather than torturing her outright as she does with most others, Regina (Lily Kaufmann, filling in for Nadina Hassan) accepts Cady into the group with the intent of savaging her from within. Cady manages to eventually turn the tables on Regina but ends up taking up the Queen Bee’s crown herself. Will she come to her senses and return to her kind, mathletic former self or stay forever on the dark side of bitchy high school mean girl?

Mean Girls may not bend the profundity meter, but the problems of bullying, shaming and prejudice have increased exponentially since 2004 and the story does have a few things to say about folly and redemption. The book has been updated to include smartphones and social media, but most of the nastiness is recognizable to anyone who’s attended high school no matter the era.

While most of the songs are forgettable, they do some of the comedic heavy lifting (despite some audio issues at the Buell that made some of the lyrics hard to hear). What really drives the show are some great performances — including Bernhardt as Cady, Jasmine Rogers as Gretchen and a real standout showing from Morgan Ashley Bryant as the dingbat Karen. Bryant owns every scene she’s in, filling in the blank spots in Karen’s character with a winning combination of effervescence and sensitivity.

Lindsay Heather Pearce and Eric Huffman are also great as Janis and Damian — teens happily existing well outside the cliques and who are first to befriend Cady.

Mean Girls moves very quickly, aided by a quite extraordinary set that uses screens and wheeled set pieces to almost instantaneously change scenes. It’s one of the more amazing scenic designs I’ve ever seen, and the ability to change backgrounds digitally really contributes to the fast pace that allows the production to explore a lot of the characters and situations.

This one plays through the beginning of the year, and while it may not be a holiday show per-se, there is one Christmas pageant scene to check that box at least partially. Mean Girls would be a great show to take the young women in your lives to (but not under 16 I’d say!) and no doubt young men will enjoy it too.