Theatre review: Mean Girls

The audience at the Savoy Theatre were largely decked out in pink today. Security let them all in, but frankly they were lucky, considering it's not Wednesday. Tina Fey's (book) musical adaptation of her endlessly quotable 2004 film with Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics) finally makes it to the West End, and the new Mean Girls doesn't disappoint: Cady Heron (Charlie Burn) goes from being home-schooled by her mother in Kenya to being thrown into the deep end of an American High School. Her guides to the convoluted class hierarchy are queer outsiders Janis (Elena Skye) and Damian (understudy Freddie Clements) but the social group she ends up joining is the Plastics, when she catches the attention of their fearsome leader Regina George (Georgina Castle.) Cady's been warned about the school's ruthless alpha pack, but thinks she can study them from the inside by treating them as the lions she watched in Africa.

Theatre review: Legally Blonde

The Open Air Theatre launches its 2022 season with one of its trademarks, a hit Broadway/West End musical reinvented for the space; but both the choice of musical and the kind of reinvention feel like a big step forward for what can traditionally be an old-fashioned, tourist-courting venue. Laurence O'Keefe & Nell Benjamin (music & lyrics) and Heather Hach's (book) Legally Blonde is based on a novel by Amanda Brown, but more famously the Reece Witherspoon-starring film adaptation. Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) is a wealthy Malibu girl who likes tiny dogs and the colour pink; from the start, Bowman's take on Elle is no dumb blonde, but neither has she done much to dispel the stereotype. She did graduate from UCLA, but she mainly seems to have gone there to join a sorority and nab herself a future husband.