Picture: Joan Marcus
When Broadway stages light up again, Mean Girls will be among the missing. The hit musical announced it has shut down permanently on the Main Stem; cited were the costs of maintaining the production without box office revenue during the extended pandemic closure of New York theatres. It is planned, however, to resume the national tour when feasible. A London production, planned before the pandemic, was also said to still be on the drawing boards
The show, fuelled by its book by Tina Fey based on her popular movie with its gimlet-eyed view of high school life, opened on Broadway on 8 April 2018 after 29 previews. By the time New York theatres were ordered to halt performances on 12 March 2020 in the wake of the Covid-19 scourge, Mean Girls had racked up 804 performances.
Amazingly, under these difficult circumstances, Mean Girls is only the second musical to negate a post-pandemic return to Broadway. Disney announced several months ago it was shuttering Frozen as far as Broadway was concerned, after 26 previews and 825 performances. Two non-musicals that were in previews at the time of the shutdown, however – Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen and a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – quickly dropped opening plans.
As of now, the pandemic lid on performance is to last through 30 May. But the shutdown has already been extended four times as the Coronavirus continues its rampage, and the actual timetables for shows to return, plans to be set by each individual production, remain as clouded as ever.
Ron Cohen
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