The high school comedy of status-sadism now reaches the same third life-cycle stage already achieved by Hairspray, The Producers and The Color Purple: the movie, the stage musical version and then the movie version of that. My own dissident reaction to the 2004 original was a mean review based on feeling it was inferior to Clueless, Election and 10 Things I Hate About You, and that it had its cake and ate it on the prettiness-fascism issue.
But I could have paid more attention to the showstopping individually funny lines; screenwriter Tina Fey after all went on to create an authentic masterpiece with TV’s 30 Rock, in which she could more successfully represent in her own person the eternal Mean Girls themes of reconciling success with kindness. Moreover the Broadway Mean Girls was a big improvement on the film because the musical genre makes everything more amusingly histrionic – the “diva” theme made explicit – and this movie version succeeds in the same way, although like the subsequent movie iteration it sags in the over-extended third act.
