I think we can all agree that Mean Girls is iconic with our favorite sayings such as “fetch” and “On Wednesday we wear pink.” Mean Girls is so popular that they have their own designated day which is, of course, on October 3rd. Watching the remake/musical was both entertaining and painful. Angourie Rice didn’t fit as the character Cady and often felt awkward or out of place. As her character develops, she still felt emotionless at the end. Comparing the singing of Angourie Rice and the Erika Henningsen, there is a HUGE difference. Angourie Rice’s singing often fell flat and empty. Enid Dominguez said “Cady seemed very bland and compared to the Broadway musical there was little to no emotion.” The singing from Reneé Rapp was pretty good though and her playing Regina George felt right. Auliʻi Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey did an amazing job of playing Janis Ian and Damien and every time they were on the screen it was always something funny and they really made the whole movie feel a lot more like the original movie. Auliʻi Cravalho’s voice gave me chills, especially with one of my favorite songs that involved a lot of emotion which is “Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise).” Although the background track didn’t really feel right with the song, her voice absolutely carried.

I loved Bebe Wood and Avantika Vandanapu who played as Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith. Avantika Vandanapu felt almost exactly like Karen with her clueless behavior. Brian Vazquez stated, “I liked the character of Karen Smith because she was funny and entertaining.” I also loved that they brought some actors who were in the original movie, like Lindsay Lohan and Tina Fey, as well as Broadway actor Ashley Park in to play a part. The only thing that I felt that lacked or made the movie dull was that everything was trying to be modernized. As Sasha Mejia states, “I felt like a lot of the choreography were trying to be TikTok dances.” Karen’s song “Sexy” also was uncomfortable and a lot of the moves seemed unnecessary in that song, unlike the Broadway musical, which had suggestive dancing but was also classy in a way and was still very captivating to the audience. I wished that they had also kept the song “Jingle Bells” when they performed as well as added in “Meet The Plastics.”  Overall the movie was decent, but it can’t beat the Broadway Musical or the original film.