Well, it has arrived! Mean Girls - the Musical has been playing at the newly named Woking Theatre (formerly the New Victoria) since Monday. I joined an obviously excited audience. Not for nothing is it called 'the Broadway and West End obsession!' But is the hype worth it? To an extent, yes. The production, however, is firmly aimed at a Gen Z and teen audience, and their verdict earlier this week was a loud and vocal YES!
Mean Girls Musical: A Gen Z Hit
So far, few modern musicals, apart from Heathers, capture the free-wheeling choreography of teenage life so vividly with its emotions, the ups and downs of student life, together with its texting romances and planned social-media humiliations.
For the most part, the narrative remains much like the original film. Cady Heron (played by Emily Lane) travels from naive outsider to complicit insider on a journey that provides a cautionary arc. However, the shift to musical theatre substantially dilutes the serrated edges of its teen spite originally seen.
Spectacle Over Satire
Where the film edged towards sharp satire, this stage adaptation leans into spectacle and emotional reassurance. The dialogue has been given a lightness of touch with jokes landing at pace and precision. The laughter suggested to me that it speaks effectively to its intended audience, with the 'designer cruelties' cushioned by songs and frequent street-dance routines.
In the end, this musical succeeds not by plunging us deeply into teenage angst but by acknowledging it as a reframe. We are onlookers engaged in the drama but never in danger of being overwhelmed by it. On that level, it works. But did I discover an obsession? I will take a rain check on that.
Guildford Shakespeare Company: 20 Years of Site-Specific Theatre
Anniversaries can sometimes feel dutiful, but as the Guildford Shakespeare Company celebrated its 20th year, the occasion was less a formal retrospective than a lively act of recollection. Interviewed by Peter Gordon, co-founders Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches traced a journey that began with little more than conviction, with their early productions operating on a profit-share basis. They rapidly discovered the practical realities of outdoor performance, with the British weather offering an immediate and unforgiving apprenticeship.
What emerged from those early challenges was not simply resilience but a defining idea. By embracing site-specific work, the company turned necessity into identity. Guildford itself became a stage: streets, parks, and buildings were repurposed as performance spaces. The effect has been twofold: audiences encountered Shakespeare anew while discovering the town's cultural geography. Twenty years on, the Guildford Shakespeare Company has done more than endure. It has embedded itself in the life of the town, shaping how stories are told and where they can be told. If the evening proved anything, it was the depth of affection the company has cultivated. That seems to me, on any level, a success worth celebrating.
Noughts and Crosses at Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
This week, the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre offers a stage adaptation of Malorie Blackman's novel(s) Noughts and Crosses. Any production about structural racism might seem heavy stuff. Blackman's themes are certainly thought-provoking, and since publication (in 2002), her books have progressed to the level of required reading for schools, with television treatments making her known to a wider public.
In Noughts and Crosses, Blackman gives social history a creative alternative: a 'reality' where European countries are colonized by 'Aprica', a grouping of African regions. As an audience, we are taken into a world that is administered and controlled by black African 'Crosses' using white European 'Noughts' as a subjugated workforce. Malorie Blackman is inverting the apartheid history once seen in the Southern States of America and South Africa.
This potentially bleak storyline is made both accessible and intimate with the introduction of a forbidden teenage love story. Callum, a white student, meets Sephy, the privileged black daughter of a senior politician, while temping as a waiter. Their mutual attraction is immediate, which is unthinkable and illegal. A relationship develops, one that offers entrance into family lives with storylines of domestic pressures and simmering resentments. Cue terrorist plots, bombs, kidnapping, an alleged rape, and murder trials. In less skillful hands, these might seem overly dramatic. Director Esther Richardson helps by encouraging a taut pace that ensures these remain plausible to young people.
