Fans of Tina Fey and Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 high school comedy Mean Girls should get excited, because the film is being adapted into a musical! The film’s writer Tina Fey, her husband and composer Jeff Richmond, and lyricist Nell Benjamin have spearheading the project. Fey mentioned the possibility of a musical in early 2013, and since then she and her team have been moving forward with the process. Richmond claims that they are aiming to finish writing the project “by the end of the summer.”
Richmond went on to explain that they are trying to get a large portion of the work done, although they realize that it will change once they have a cast selected. “We know that 60 or 70 percent of that (their script) will go away when we start bringing in real singers and actors. We’ll do a lot of rewriting.” He claims that a large portion of the project now is simply working through the problems of transitioning a spoken film into a musical and deciding what will be sang versus what will remain spoken lines. He claims that this is “the most difficult process.”
Nell Benjamin also detailed the difficulties of transforming Mean Girls from film to stage. “The process has been starting with the movie, but also thinking about what’s going to make it a musical theater piece.” He claims that none of them are looking to simply toss the project on stage, that instead they are wanting to “do something for the theater kid in all of us, and it’s been about trying to find the theatrical in what was in the movie.”
Thus far there have been no official casting decisions for the Mean Girls musical. It is unclear if Fey will be reclaiming her role, or if the team intends to recruit any of the film’s original cast for appearances in some form. Nell Benjamin expects that the casting process will begin “as early as May,” though it will be a looser process until the script is finalized.
Featuring a cast of Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Poehler, and many others was a critical success and has developed a cult following. With a budget of $17 million, the film has raked in a total of more than $129 million worldwide. Although the celebrity-laden cast hasn’t remained incredibly close, they have reunited for the film’s tenth anniversary. Along with the Mean Girls musical development, it is rumored that Fey is considering work on a sequel to the project. It has been alleged that the cast approached Fey while celebrating the anniversary. If this is true, Mean Girls could be gearing up to entertain an entirely new generation of youths.
FDRMX Eyes: De La Romance is a cinematic pop outfit based in France. The band has recently released a music video for their song “Unfree.”
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