‘Mean Girls’ Review: Now With Songs and Social Media

Only the very best Broadway musicals normally get promoted to the big screen. There’s a reason for this: The in-person experience can be so dazzling, with the performers right in front of you, that showmanship can partly make up for mediocre writing. On the screen, though, there is no way to distract the audience from not-great songs. The ones in Broadway’s 2018 musical “Mean Girls,” an adaptation of the nonmusical 2004 film written by Tina Fey, feel like filler on screen. A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Once again, new kid Cady Heron (the talented Angourie Rice takes over for Lindsay Lohan from the 2004 movie), who was home-schooled while growing up in Kenya, has moved to the Chicago suburbs and, at a public high school, finds herself effectively an alien seeking to learn the complex codes of suburban teen interaction. Two comic Virgils explain in song the rules of hell to this Dante: Janis (Auli‘i Cravalho, the voice star of “Moana”) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey from Broadway’s “A Strange Loop”), each of whom offer wicked barbs about adolescent culture.