By Emma Weidmann | Arts and Life Editor
Raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimized by a movie soundtrack.
The new “Mean Girls” movie soundtrack has caused division on TikTok due to weak vocals and stark differences from the original Broadway musical. If you spent any amount of time on social media this week, this is what you would see spread about like pages from a Burn Book:
“This comparison is ruining the day of theater nerds globally.”
“Where did all the energy go?”
“The direct comparison is really tragic.”
But, aside from the social media hate bandwagon, how does the new actually stack up to the old?
For one, criticisms of the vocal performances have their merit, mostly. Many complaints are with the tracks “Stupid With Love” and “Revenge Party” — both aimed at Angourie Rice (Cady Heron). You may know her as Betty Brant in “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” one of the school announcement anchors.
The main issue with Rice’s performance isn’t that she does a bad job acting. She’s not originally a singer, so the decision to cast her in a movie-musical is a questionable one on the part of the directors. However, plenty of non-singers have been cast in similar roles — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and Amanda Bynes in “Hairspray,” to name a couple.
The issue is really that it seems there was very little vocal training involved, and it shows. In “Stupid With Love,” Rice struggles to enunciate her consonants in the titular lines, and she holds onto notes by her fingernails in “Revenge Party.” Plainly, she sounds extremely bored with each note she barely hits.
Cast a non-singer all you want, but it’s a mistake to alter preexisting songs to fit the meager range, as is evident when comparing the two versions of “Revenge Party.” Take a listen to the chorus of each, and prepare to be blown away by the difference.
It’s unclear why it seems the only one to give Rice some vocal pointers — during recording, not before — was Reneé Rapp, as Rice told The Hollywood Reporter. Rice has made no mention of a team of vocal coaches, which leads me to believe her only help was from Rapp.
On the topic of non-singers, Christopher Briney (Aaron Samuels) doesn’t sing one song in this adaptation, and he told Entertainment Weekly he was “so fine with it.”
“I don’t want to do that to people,” he said in the interview. He’s joking, but there’s really nothing funny about it at all, considering the state of much of the soundtrack.
Another performance that is hearing its fair share of critique is “Sexy,” sung by Avantika (Karen Smith). Personally, I disagree with the negativity around this performance. Avantika brought a pop twist to the track but left it faithful to its show-tune roots.
“Sexy” is an example of what the soundtrack was trying to do, gone right, when it so often goes wrong. It is hard to attract a general audience to musical theater, which is why this remake wasn’t marketed as such. This would explain why the songs strike a more mainstream note compared to the original.
It lacks what makes the original so Broadway — the kitsch, the corniness in all its theater-kid glory. Its inaccessibility is what makes it charming, because it’s like Regina George. It doesn’t care what you think. Avantika’s “Sexy” successfully caters to the pop audience without desecrating the original.
However, Reneé Rapp (Regina George) gives a performance that is downright inarguable, and for good reason: She played the “apex predator” on Broadway from 2019 to 2021. It’s no wonder that the MTV VMA-nominated singer-slash-actress knocked it out of the park. It’s all she knows how to do. Rapp’s vocals are no joke. Anyone who has listened to her album “Snow Angel” could tell you that. However, her acting chops are there as well, with her role on HBO’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls” as evidence.
Rapp is a solid Regina, and her delivery on “Meet the Plastics” and “World Burn” is just as good as any Broadway rendition, because Rapp is the Broadway rendition.
Finally, there are multiple lyric changes from the original. They’re small — only by a line or even just a word — but they’re huge changes in meaning. In “Meet The Plastics,” Rapp sings, “That filter you use looks just like me” instead of “I never weigh more than 115.” The new lyric isn’t actually new; it’s an alternate option in high school versions of the script. The movie adaptation cleaned up what, according to Tina Fey, could be “potentially challenging” for young people. It’s a faithful and welcome fix.
Notably, “Sexy” also has a lyric change. Originally, the line is “This is modern feminism talkin’/I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in.” Avantika instead sings, “Watch me as I run the world in shoes I cannot walk in.” A minor change, but the implication is wildly altered. It seems that the new adaptation not only swerves encouraging weight loss but wants to make it clear that you can be a girlboss and also wear high heels.
All in all, it’s not a thoroughly terrible soundtrack, but it isn’t amazing by any stretch of the imagination. It has its high points in Reneé Rapp and its confusing and unnecessary low moments in Angourie Rice. Of course, this is just a look at the music. In order to get a full picture of these performances, view them in their proper context in the movie — then see what you think.
