Natalie Jambor as Regina George. Samir Iydroose Photos.
Regina George stood behind a copy machine, her face bathed in a purple and blue light coming from the printer. In her hands, she held a hot pink “Burn Book,” where she and her friends wrote catty remarks about their peers. She had just discovered that her friends had turned against her—and had a plan for revenge.
George—here played by Natalie Jambor, a rising senior at Mark T. Sheehan High School in Wallingford—is a character in the now-canonical musical Mean Girls, which ran for four nights only at the New Haven Academy of Performing Arts (NHAOPA) in East Haven last week. Part of a pre-college, conservatory-style program offered for teens ages 13 through 17, the performance showcased many of the skills the actors had spent the past month building, such as belting, scene-studies, and flashy dance numbers.
Before performing, Jambor and 47 other teens did a weeklong musical theater intensive that culminated in a professional mock audition. In the following three weeks, they began rehearsing for Mean Girls. This year, the program included eight boys—a new record for NHAOPA in its 11-year run.
NHAOPA Co-Founders Billy DiCrosta and Nick Fuentes.
NHAOPA Co-Founders Billy DiCrosta and Nick Fuentes, who are partners in life as well as in work, chose Mean Girls as their summer musical in December of last year, as they had received many requests to stage it. The show was a popular pick: NHAOPA had had to turn 20 teens away from the program, and each performance was sold out, with a waitlist of 50 people.
The female leads were double-cast (this review covers a Saturday performance of the “Regina Cast”), and on the nights they were not performing, students would operate the sound, lighting, and projections.
That marked another kind of growth: NHAOPA previously had not offered any education for the technical and crew aspects of theater. Jambor said that the educational parts of the program were really helpful for her. “I want to pursue musical theater in college,” she said. “It was a really good experience because I am going to face those sorts of auditions.”
Based on the 2004 film of the same name, the musical version of Mean Girls follows Cady Heron (Sophia De Oliveira, a rising junior at Jonathan Law High School and the Educational Center for the Arts), who grew up in Kenya, as she navigates going to high school in the United States. At school, misfits Janis (Kylie Acquarulo-Savastano, a rising sophomore at Roger Williams University), the school’s resident “art freak” and Damian (Austin Lago, a rising freshman at Montclair State University), an openly gay character, take Cady under their wings.
Top: Sophia De Oliveira as Cady Heron. Bottom: Kylie Acquarulo-Savastano as Janis.
They task Cady with infiltrating the Plastics, a ruthless and snide group of friends consisting of Gretchen Wieners (Myrissa Savo, a rising freshman at the University of Rhode Island), Karen Smith (Payton Goodwin, a rising freshman at Sacred Heart University), and Regina George, the “Apex Predator” of North Shore.
Chaos ensues: Cady gets friendly with Regina’s attractive and numerically-challenged boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Luke Cashman, a rising sophomore at Guilford High School), is pulled so far into the Plastics that it seems she might not emerge, and somewhere along the way is part of a Rockettes-style routine to "Jingle Bell Rock" that makes the principal itchy. In the 22 years since the movie opened, it has become a kind of cult classic, home to lines like “On Wednesdays we wear pink” and “The limit does not exist.”
Saturday night, Savo and Goodwin had a wonderful chemistry and were standouts from the performance. At the start of the play, for instance, there was already a subtle rift between Regina and Gretchen, because Gretchen kept trying to popularize the phrase “so fetch,” and Regina rejected it over and over. Cady later sent a candygram to herself from Regina, and didn’t send one to Gretchen from Regina. Savo showed how eager Gretchen was to throw herself at Regina, portraying how Gretchen both valued Regina’s affirmations and approval, and also feared being abandoned by her.
In another scene, Cady and members of the Plastics gathered at Regina’s house, and Regina pulled Karen aside to change her eyebrows. Gretchen asked Regina if she could come along, but the two had already gone into another room. Savo delivered an enthusiastic laugh-sob, conveying a sense of wanting a social status so badly she might weep over it.
In the script (as in the movie), Karen is written as an oblivious character—perhaps a more severe adjective would be apropos—and Goodwin embodied that perfectly. She managed to look absent and distracted while acting, by seeming sincere when saying something like “I can sexy-cure some cancer,” keeping a wide-eyed facial expression, and playing with her hair while other people were talking. Goodwin also soared through choreography as well, executing each move in pencil-thin stilettos.
As the alpha female, Jambor also delivered. When she delivered the revenge ballad “World Burn,” which closes the first act, even the most solemn of stenographers would have had no choice but to add an obscene number of vowels to their transcription, and even then, that would only partially encapsulate the way she sang. As Jambor continued singing, the other students at North Shore filed onto the stage, and began fighting, incited by the proclamations of being “fugly cows” and “grotsky beyotches.” It showed, in real time, the power that the popular character wielded over other students.
At moments, this Mean Girls also leaned in to its ability to be silly. There were bouts of giggling among both the cast and crew, rightfully so, when Coach Carr (Chase Tuttle, a rising junior at Guilford High School) came onto the stage, sporting a cropped shirt. Tuttle said that he has a “weird talent where [he] can inflate [his stomach] really wide.” His portrayal of Coach Carr was quite good, using a barky and gruff voice very apt to the character who confidently incompetently stumbles through a sexual education unit. Tuttle also portrayed a lunch lady, and his twirling of the ladle was to a similar effect.
Meanwhile, the theater’s tech components—the space has a 280 degree projection system—also did some of the heavy lifting, both behind the actors and on the sides of the theater. During one such scene, a disastrous talent show in which Regina flashed the audience, a viewer could see how this system worked to tell a story. In the play, several people attending the talent show uploaded pictures of Regina’s underwear to social media, and the projection effectively showed those and the slew of vitriolic comments that followed.
Top: The cast. Bottom: Chase Tuttle as Coach Carr.
At moments, the projections teetered on the verge of overpowering the action on stage, making clear what a balancing act the whole play was. During a scene where Cady sang about her move from Africa, comparing the differences between the animal hierarchy and the human one, a bunch of short, stock videos of elephants and giraffes appeared on the walls, almost enough to pull attention away from her. So too when Karen sang a song about Halloween, and images of skeletons and children holding hands splashed across the walls.
Using a projection allows the scene transitions to be a lot faster. “Instead of having to wheel things in and out, the projections allow it to be almost instant,” said Fuentes. He also pointed out how the projection system is useful in plays with magic, or for when characters need to fly. For example, when Cady had her calculus class, they projected an image of various Greek characters and trigonometric functions written on a chalkboard, which eliminated the need to have a physical chalkboard.
For any math purists, you may be disappointed with that aspect of the show as it is just a bunch of nonsensical equations. For everyone else, the NHAOPA’s production of Mean Girls punched far above its weight and the time it took to produce, and it would be well worth the price of the ticket.
This article comes from the ninth and current cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). From June 29 through August 21, YAJI students pitch, report, write and edit stories with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman, Program Assistants Abiba Biao and Grayce Howe and Mentor Ruby Szekeres. Samir Iydroose is a rising junior at Hamden High School.