Mean Girls: Review

Go and see the elegant brutality of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls at The Opera House, beloved musical of the beloved film.

Cady Heron (Emily Lane) is the daughter of a zoologist and has lived an unsheltered life on a research station in Kenya. Cady’s nurturing years were spent observing that survival cannot afford sentimentality. Since she was in baby Birkenstocks, she had an unflinching eye on the ferocity of the food chain. That childhood prepared her perfectly for the concrete savannah of North Shore High School. Drop her into a matchbox town in Illinois and give her two hours (including interval) and she will identify the apex predator, track her movements and eventually, take her down.

That big cat is Regina George, played by Vivian Panka with the untouchable sheen of Beyonce and the growl of a panther in her fabulous voice. Regina is an icon. We build icons and then we circle them. Recently, when I did some outreach at a high school we talked about gossip – everyone in every year knew everything about the popular kids. The surveillance was constant.

The hierarchy of life is all made clear to us by the ultimate soothsayers of all musical theatre, and all of life – the gays. Janis (Georgie Buckland) and Damian (Max Gill) sit on the outskirts knowing they are the absolute coolest. They tell us with crystal clear cutting comments written sharply in lyrics by Nell Benjamin, the taxonomy of mathletes, jocks and plastics. I felt like they were my friends. Isn’t it funny that we all feel we are in the outsider tribe? Just me? Doubtful.

The musical got COVID in 2020 on Broadway which possibly slowed momentum but since touring and being made into a film of the musical it has equalled the original version. You can see in the musical that the film scenes have had time to bed in. And the songs distil the themes of social Darwinism, inequality and icons.

The production design really lifts the themes of the story; the initial image of the Serengeti is hilariously grandiose and has a wry reference to The Lion King. It’s a deceptively a simple set when it comes to Northshore High – tables and chairs on casters reconfigure and make scene changes seamless. I love the ‘Meet the Plastics’ choreography by Casey Nicholaw, creating a revolve of all the types of kids in the cafeteria.

It’s all so funny. So mean. So joyous. I don’t like us laughing at Regina getting her comeuppance by being in a wheelchair though. It feels dated. A story so invested in outsiders and what they teach could take that small step further. Throughout the show there is mindful representation, yet disability sits outside the frame. When you are already dissecting who gets power, who is exiled, it matters.

Cady, surviving with superficial scars finds along the way, as Javere in Les Mis did – if you look to the stars, we are mere flickers. Even those of us who think we are kind of a massive deal. Loyalties are tested, weaknesses surface, evolution happens. Encore.

Mean Girls is at The Opera House, Manchester from 23 February to 7 March 2026.

Banner image: MEAN GIRLS THE MUSICAL. Kiara Dario (Gretchen Wieners), Vivian Panka (Regina George) and Sophie Pourret (Karen Smith). Photo by Paul Coltas