Fetch happened in Blackpool last night, as Mean Girls The Musical arrived at the Winter Gardens Opera House for the opening leg of five performances. Antonia Charlesworth’s teenage daughters took her along for a night of inter-generational female empowerment.
If you’ve somehow avoided Mean Girls until now, then, well, you probably are one. But if you don’t know the story, the shape of it is this: home-schooled Cady Heron (Emily Lane) arrives at North Shore High and, within her first day, falls in with Janis and Damian – two self-declared art-room outsiders who take her under their wing.
Janis has her own history with the school’s ruling clique, The Plastics – she and Regina George were once best friends, until a rumour Regina spread about her in middle school ended it for good – and she persuades Cady to infiltrate the group from the inside. That means getting close to queen bee Regina (Vivian Panka), sharp but insecure Gretchen Wieners (Kiara Dario) and the guileless Karen Smith (Sophie Pourret), with the plan of quietly bringing the whole hierarchy down.
This touring production leans into a pop and R&B-inflected sound that owes more to 2024’s movie musical than to the brighter, more traditional book-musical melodies of the original 2018 Broadway score. The result plays like a hybrid of the two screen versions and the stage show rather than a straight revival of any one of them.
Faye Tozer – that’s Faye from Steps to the millennials in the audience – takes on the demanding triple-cast role of Ms Heron, Ms Norbury and Mrs George with effortless precision. Emily Lane’s Cady carries the show with the right balance of wide-eyed naivety curdling slowly into calculation, and special mention goes to Michael Dean-Wilson, who played Damian as understudy, leading the narrative and holding the stage effortlessly.
Three numbers stood out as much for their emotional and narrative weight as their vocal prowess. Naturally, I See Stars, the moment Cady finally chooses to share the crown rather than keep it for herself, lands the show’s central turn without overplaying it. Before that, More Is Better, Cady’s bedroom duet with love interest Aaron, is genuinely sweet without tipping into saccharine. Elsewhere, Janis’s I’d Rather Be Me provides the emotional backbone of the whole piece – an anthem about refusing to shrink yourself to keep the peace and calling out the double standard that lets boys express anger while girls are expected to smile through it.
It’s difficult to avoid drawing parallels with Heathers, Mean Girls’ cult 1980s cousin in the teen-movie-to-stage-musical pipeline – not least because Vivian Panka, this production’s Regina George, previously played Heather Duke in Heathers The Musical’s West End run and pro-shot film. While Heathers never updated its 1989 setting, Mean Girls has reinvented itself with every new version, layering in smartphones and the specific cruelties of growing up online into this latest production.
It’s an understandable instinct and there are nods here to how meanness looks different in 2026 than it did when the 2004 Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams film was released – or indeed the 2002 Rosalind Wiseman book it was based on. But there’s also a sense that something is lost each time a show chases the present moment rather than staying planted in the one that made it resonate in the first place.
A genuine highlight of this production is its costuming, which has had a glow-up from earlier versions and does real storytelling work on its own. The show also deserves credit for its queer inclusivity, woven through North Shore High without ever feeling like box-ticking, and for a closing message to its young audience about choosing kindness over power.
Mean Girls may never fully settle on which version of itself it wants to be, but as long as there are pressures on teenagers that create real-life mean girls – whether they come from burn books or smartphones – its message will continue to land.
Mean Girls is at the Winter Gardens Opera House until 22 August 2026. Book here.
