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Who will be in MEAN GIRLS in the West End? | Mickey-Jo's thoughts on the musical's cast announcement
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- [00:00]
Mickey Jo
On Wednesdays, we announced the original West End cast of highly anticipated transfers of musical adaptations of beloved films. And we also wear pink. Oh, my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a theatre critic, a pundit, a fan and a content creator here on social media. You can also find me over on Instagram, over on TikTok. But today I am here on YouTube celebrating World Theatre Day. Happy World Theater Day, everybody. By the time you're seeing this video, it may be Thursday. I apologize. I actually woke up feeling incredibly unwell this morning. You can kind of still hear it in my nose. However, the perfect medicine was apparently the announcement of the West End cast of Mean Girls. So because this is one of the most anticipated casting announcements of the year, I feel I thought we'd do a full video on here. Getting excited about it and for me to talk through each member of this principal cast and why this casting is so exciting, what you may have seen them in before, and basically why, if you don't already have your tickets, you need to get your tickets to go see Mean Girls. Now, if you enjoyed today's video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel where I post all sorts of theatre themed videos. And if you have any thoughts about the Mean Girls casting, comment down below. Whose performance are you most excited to see later this year at the Savoy? So let's start with the performer who is going to be playing the leading role of Cady Heron, and that is going to be Charlie Byrne. So Charlie is perhaps best known for having played Cosette in the UK and Ireland tour of Les Miserables. And I believe she also played the role in the All Star staged concert. Now, Cady obviously is a very different vocal type from Cosette, but there are many of these musical theatre performers who will surprise you. They seem to be classical sopranos and they have this secret belt range as well. So very intrigued to hear specifically what Charlie is going to sound like singing the Katy material. We don't really know what version of the show this is going to be because after the musical was on Broadway, they then tinkered with it a little bit for the national tour. They then made further changes for the film, but we don't really know what we're getting in the West End. But we do know that Charlie Byrne will be playing Cady Heron. If you don't know about Mean Girls somehow, then Cady is our protagonist. She has previously been homeschooled by her parents, who she was living with in Africa, they've moved to the US and she is excited about the prospect of being able to make friends her own age who are not jungle animals. Do I mean jungle animals like Savannah? That doesn't seem like the same thing. Newly exposed to a school full of cliques and rules, she finds herself at the center of this plot to over overthrow the most popular students in the school called the Plastics. And we're gonna meet them next.
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Gretchen Wieners
Girls, I've got some piping hot tea. I'm more of an iced tea person. Ooh, like an iced chai latte?
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Mickey Jo
Yes.
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Gretchen Wieners
I love those. No, no, this tea is hot. Like English breakfast. Mmm. Breakfast. Anyone else craving a breakfast burrito? There are no breakfast burritos where we're going. Pack your bags because we're going London. Omg. I am so chuffed. What is chuffed? It's like slang from England. Gretchen, stop trying to make chuffed happen. It is not going to happen.
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Mickey Jo
So though Katy is the leading role, perhaps one of the most sought after roles in this show is Regina George. Regina is the head of the Plastics, of course, played by Rachel McAdams in the original film, played by Taylor Louderman on Broadway, and then played by Renee Rapp on Broadway, who also reprised her performance for. For the recent film remake. My thoughts about which are all here on my channel, by the way, if you want to go and check out what I thought about that. But in the West End, the role of Regina George is going to be played by Georgina Castle. Georgina was most recently seen on stage at the Dominion Theatre in the return engagement of the popular Christmas musical Elf, where she was playing the leading role of Jovi. The Zooey Deschanel role from the film, which very different to Regina George, I will say, but something a little closer to that character is when she was in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella before it was bad Cinderella, she was one of the steps in the West End, the one with the high belt y bit where she's like, we can take on mother. Interestingly enough, this is multiple Cinderella alumni, because Charlie Byrne, just flicking through her bio then apparently did the workshop of Cinderella again before it was bad, at the other palace. Who knew? Who knew that Angela Webber, Cinderella and Mean Girls would have so much in common? Honestly, it kind of makes sense. But that little section of Cinderella, I think, is the closest indication we've had as to what Georgina might sound like. Regina George, because this role is a huge. Sing songs like Someone Gets Hurt and World Burn. Are these Stratospheric high belts. We've already seen a little teaser clip of her with the other plastic. She seems to have the characterization down. She looks right for the role. So it really is just the vocals that I'm very intrigued about and waiting to hear more of. And this, I think, is going to be the performance and the role by which people really judge the West End production of the show, because it's kind of all about Regina. Although Regina is not the only titular mean girl, she is joined by Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith, who will be played by Elena Gyazi and Grace Moatt, respectively. Both Grace and Elena are alumni of the musical. Grace was the original super swing who covered all six of the Queens and was the only understudy at the time when the show was first premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then touring the UK afterwards. It's still mind blowing that she managed to do that now. After six, Grace went on to understudy the role of Juliet in the West End musical, and Juliet she then replaced in Be More Chill, she did Legally Blonde at Regent Park Open Air Theatre. So a lot of these other kind of, like, high school set musicals. Elena, meanwhile, played Catherine Parr in the UK tour of Six. And I actually got the chance to see Elena in a workshop production of a musical called Halls, which is set in a British university, which is a little bit different to North Shore High School, but you still get the same kind of a vibe tonally. So I think these two are going to be just brilliant. When Grace was in Legally Blonde, one of my favorite line readings of the entire show, she was playing, I think, Pilar. And right before the song Bend and Snap, she was like, for real. You have to become the cheerleader you fear. And, like, that's, I think, a great insight into how brilliantly she's going to play Karen. What I also want to applaud here is that we haven't done the thing of making just Gretchen the POC role within the Plastics, which is something that we've seen before, not only in Mean Girls, but in other musicals like Heather's, where Heather Duke is consistently the POC role understudied by a POC performer in the ensemble. I love that the representation among the Plastics in the West End is a little bit broader and more diverse, so little girls everywhere get to see that they can also be mean if they want to be. Oh, I didn't think that through. So to give you a sense of each of those characters, Regina George is this perfect, pristine queen bee who everyone fears she's kind of like the Heather Chandler of Mean Girls. Gretchen, meanwhile, is at her right hand side keeping all of her secrets. And Karen is also there, but is perhaps not the brightest spark, shall we say. You gotta love her. Now it's the Plastics who Cady becomes friends with and eats lunch with when she arrives at Northshore High School. But only on the suggestion of the two friends she makes first. Janice Damien. So in the West End production, Janice is going to be played by Elena Skye and Damien is going to be played by Tom Xander. Tom is probably best known for playing Elder Cunningham in the West End production of the Book of Mormon. He might have been the first British actor to play the role full time. Or I could be lying about that. But for a long time they were casting Americans and bringing them over here to play Elder Price and Elder Cunningham. And I think Tom may have been, if not the first and among the first British actors to play Elder Cunningham full time. He's going to be a lovely Damien. I think I can see him being very funny in the role. And Elena Skye has recently been seen as Twiggy in the Twiggy musical and prior to that as Scaramouche in We Will Rock youk at the London Coliseum. Which means there is one thing we already know that she can do very well and that is give you vocals. These belty vocals. Now, Janis has a great song towards the end of the show called I'd Rather Be Me and it seems like Elena Skye is going to be able to knock that out of the park. I will say with no disrespect towards these actors whatsoever, because they are both phenomenal talents, it does feel the tiniest bit disappointing that in the recent film adaptation we had PoC representation for Janis and Damien kind of taking these characters in a new, different direction to then return to what seems like the default in the West End. Although I'm excited about the fact that among the ensemble is Bailey Carson, former Anne Boleyn in the Western cast of six, who is going to be understudying the role of Janice. Bailey is a phenomenal vocalist just like Eleanor is and is also an non binary, which is just as important, I think, to see represented on stage. Make no mistake, I will be going back to see a Bailey Carson Janice show. Now, Janis and Damien are these alternative artsy best friends who try and coerce Cady into ruining Regina's life and infiltrating the Plastics and it all gets a little bit out of hand. Janis has her own reasons for wanting to do this. And Damien is just sort of participatory, but they're also two of the film and the show's most lovable characters. Now, there are a few more members of the principal cast who we need to talk about here. So we have Aaron Samuels, who is the ex boyfriend of Regina George and the early love interest of Cady Heron. He is going to be played by Daniel Bravo, who can currently be seen right now in another teen high school based musical adaptation of a film, Cruel Intentions, at the Other palace, where he is starring in the leading role of Sebastian Valmont. And in that capacity, he's doing the whole like enigmatic heartthrob thing very well. His performance as Aaron Samuels, I dare say will be a little less intense and a little less sexually aggressive than Cruel Intentions, but if the confident performance that he's giving in that show is any indication, I think he's also going to be brilliant in this. Then we have Luka Chadwick Patel, another alumnus of the Regent's park revival of Legally Blonde, who is going to be playing Kevin G. Fun story. I had to be at the Dominion a couple months ago for a rehearsal, press event, I think, and there was a sign on one of the doors saying that Sonja Friedman, who is producing Mean Girls, was casting. And I saw Luka Chadwick Patel outside of the building and I thought, what are the chances that he's in for Kevin G in Mean Girls? And clearly I'm a genius. Now, Aaron Samuels is your typical, just like crush worthy high school boy. And Kevin G. Has a lot more personality. He is on the Mathletes team and he's just very charismatic, shall we say. But what is a show set in a high school without some adult supervision? So we also have Akko Mitchell, who is going to be playing Mr. Mr. Oh, I entered that with such confidence. What's his name? Mr. Duvall. Mr. Duvall. He's going to be playing the principal, Mr. Duvall. And Zoe Rainey, meanwhile, is going to be playing this adult female track that covers multiple different roles. She will be playing Cady Heron's mother. She will be playing Regina's mother, which is maybe the showiest part. And also Ms. Norbury. The roles played on film, of course, by Anna Gasteyer, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, respectively, all alumni of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. And each of those is a funny part in its own way. Some of them more effervescent, others a little more dry, which works for Zoe Rainey, who I believe understudied the role of Glinda in Wicked. I recently saw her in the concert version of Maiden Dagenham, and she played Amavon Tussle in Hairspray in the West End. Now, the originator, this set of female characters in the Broadway show was Kerry Butler, who of course originated the role of Penny Pingleton in Hairspray on Broadway. So a nice parallel there back to Akko Mitchell before we move on. And he's been in many, many shows. I recently saw him not too long ago in the UK tour of the Color Purple and he was in Bonnie and Clyde in the West End at one point. I thought he was in the Arts Theatre run. He was also the original Sweaty Eddie in Sister act at the London Palladium. And I feel like Mr. Duvall might take him back in that direction a little bit. And I'm excited to see that Let in this ensemble. We have Tia Antoine Charles, Georgia Aaron, Liam Buckland, Shona Buwu, Bailey Carson, who I told you is covering Janis Freddie Clemence, Siobhan Diffin, Cleona Finn, Fergie Fraser, Angus Good, who I believe is first cover for Aaron Samuels, Jenny Huxley, Gordon Holly Libird, Corey Mitchell, Mervyn Narona, Aaron Rayner, who is going to be covering Kevin G. And Mr. Duvall, because I saw him post it on Instagram. Trezel Sargent, Josh Singleton, Annie Southall, Lily Esquires, Tommy Waits Smith and Holly Willock. And I think this is an exciting cast. I do. People may have expected them to go a little bit younger with some of the cast. It was sort of ranging between, like early to mid-20s and, like early-30s with some of these performers. But it's a big West End show on a big West End stage, so people read differently from that kind of a distance. And also the thing about when you cast, like, fresh out of drama school talent is it can be a little bit harder for them to sustain the stamina of an immediate lead in a West End show. That's a very daunting thing to suddenly have to do. That's no shade to the many drama school graduates who we've seen go into those huge roles and do a fantastic job. But I think there's also something to be said for hiring a slightly more established cast. And the show is evidently already doing very well because not only have they announced the cast a day, but they have also announced an extended extension to 16th February 2025. Now the show begins previews in June of this year. With this extension, they've put 140,000 new tickets on sale, 45,000 of which are priced at £40 or less. And from a certain point in the previews, I believe they're going to be introducing Friday matinees. Or maybe they do Friday matinees from the beginning, but not many shows do a Friday matinee and Juliet used to. Book of Mormon is another one that does. So I know some people like to try and see as many shows in one week. If they're visiting the West End, Mean Girls on a Friday Matinee could be a great choice and I just think that's a good vibe Anyway, like, finish work a little bit early on a Friday, go see Mean Girls in the West End. That's fun. But those have been my thoughts on today's particularly fetch casting news. Let me know what you think of this cast in the comments section down below. Who have you seen on stage before? Whose performance are you most looking forward to? I am particularly thrilled for my friend Grace Mowatt, who I think is going to be fantastic in this show, but I'm excited to see all of them. I'm just very excited to see Mean Girls in the West End. We as a theatre community have waited long enough for this day and you heard it here first. I think it's going to be a big pink hit. Of course, when the show opens, I will be making a review video here on my channel, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any more Mean Girls, the musical, West End content or any of the videos I'll be making about other West End and Broadway shows. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope that you enjoyed and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey Day. Subscribe.