This month, Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion becomes the latest Nineties film to hop on the “let’s make it a musical!” craze. In many ways it was inevitable. The 1997 screwball comedy, which follows best friends Romy (played in the film by Oscar winner Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Friends star Lisa Kudrow) as they fib and flounce their way to their 10-year high school reunion, is a cult classic with a devoted fanbase and plenty of nostalgia to mine — the three requirements for any musical these days, it seems.
And if nostalgia is the goal, as is the case with many recent stage-to-screen adaptations (Mean Girls; The Notebook; Pretty Woman), then Romy & Michele: The Musical certainly achieves that. In development for about a decade, the musical lands in New York at a moment when people are increasingly craving the comforts of a pre-social media culture: flip phones and face-to-face conversation, to name a few.
