In the midst of the ultimate revenge party that is a coup attempt, Broadway’s Mean Girls musical has announced it is closing and will not resume performances whenever Broadway theaters may reopen. Tina Fey wrote the book for the musical based on her script for the film, and it features music by her husband, longtime 30 Rock composer Jeff Richmond, and lyrics by Legally Blonde’s Nell Benjamin. Casey Nicholaw directed the show, which earned 12 Tony nominations but won none (The Band’s Visit swept that year). Mean Girls played its last performance on Wednesday, March 11, the day before Broadway went dark. The shutdown is set to extend through May at the very least, though much will depend on the vaccine rollout before anything is certain.
While the immediate shutdown cut short the runs of plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Hangmen, Mean Girls joins Disney’s Frozen on the list of high-profile film-to-musical productions, of the kind designed to run for years, that won’t be back after the pandemic. In another timeline, the musical might have closed before now anyway; it had already started to rely on star casting to draw in audiences in the months before the pandemic, bringing on Vine star Cameron Dallas in January and Sabrina Carpenter on March 10. Still, in the show’s closing notice, the producers, including Lorne Michaels himself, said they’re still going forward with plans for a national tour and an adaptation of Mean Girls the musical back into a movie with Paramount Pictures. Look at them, still trying to make fetch happen!