Who needs to learn to park? “Everywhere you go has valet!” Cher Horowitz, teen heroine of 1995 cult movie Clueless, is one of the most spoilt and entitled characters ever to have appeared on screen. She is also, with her irrepressible urge to solve other people’s problems and her coltish steps towards self-knowledge, one of the most endearing. Millennial women like me, who grew up watching the movie again at every sleepover, will defend her against all comers.
Now, Clueless is the latest millennial coming-of-age movie to hit the West End as a stage musical, opening to critics last week at Trafalgar Theatre. It follows Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, both of which opened in London last year, each built to replicate the success of the repeatedly revived Legally Blonde: The Musical. (Sadly, Jennifer Coolidge has yet to cameo.)
All of this would normally be reason for me to get snippy about mindless trends in musical theatre. Instead, I took one of my oldest friends from school and we had a blast. My only regret is that neither of us had the energy to replicate Cher’s yellow-and-black tweed miniskirt. Not since Shakespeare’s Malvolio first burst on to the stage in yellow cross-garters has an erotomaniac wasp look-alike left such a cultural footprint.
Yet it’s not clear how long producers can keep pumping these familiar stories through the intellectual property reconfiguration mill. Teen life has changed since the turn of the millennium. The protagonists of Clueless and Mean Girls were always defined by their deft navigation of in-group/out-group bullying, but their real-life descendants now have to handle social media, online misogyny and seemingly constant requests for nudes.
Even the heroines of Legally Blonde or The Devil Wears Prada represent young women now entering an increasingly fraught and fast-paced professional landscape. (Imagine Miranda Priestly’s after-hours demands if she had access to WhatsApp, or Elle Woods and her law school tutor boyfriend filling out a post-#MeToo relationship-disclosure form.) Most notable, however, is the experience gap between high school pre and post social media. The smartphone shift turns Hollywood’s teen movies from contemporary social commentary to retro relic.
Of these stage musicals, Clueless has the advantage in incorporating adaptation and adaptability into its story DNA. As every true fan knows, Amy Heckerling’s film was a step-by-step recreation of Jane Austen’s Regency novel Emma, with the eponymous Surrey heiress reincarnated as the queen bee of a Beverly Hills high school.
Austen’s Emma had to learn that she couldn’t make illegitimate charity girl Harriet Smith any happier by crafting her into a social climber; Cher, played by a glowingly blond Alicia Silverstone, learns the same lessons on awkward school newcomer Tai (Brittany Murphy). Heckerling’s great success – alongside the zinging one-liners – was to hit each of Austen’s narrative beats as her protagonist makes the same mistakes. Changes are modernising but not structurally significant. Where Cher’s desirable classmate Christian turns out to be gay, his equivalent in Austen’s novel, Frank Churchill, is unavailable to her because he is secretly engaged to another woman. In both cases, our heroine learns the hard way that not every man is hers for the taking.
Clueless, The Musical has had mixed reviews. As critics have noted, the sets are underwhelming for a West End show; the songs, crafted by KT Tunstall to mimic the original soundtrack, don’t always work. Yet for many millennials, Clueless, The Musical will deliver a reverie of 90s nostalgia so joyful, it has the power to distract us from worrying about our children’s toxic schoolrooms.
That’s due in part to the perky central performance by Emma Flynn. It’s also due to one essential production decision. At no point does anyone involved in this production try to kid us that the world has changed since the 1990s. Cher and best friend Dionne still speak on brick mobile phones; when someone brings a mobile to the dinner table, it’s a shocking novelty, not a depressing norm.
There’s something profoundly comforting about this model for teenage life. Secondary school for me could be vicious, competitive and cruel, but each day when I came home I had the security of shutting the door behind me and leaving the social squabbling outside. For teenagers today, that bustling and bullying seems to seep into the domestic space, along with deepfake porn, medical misinformation and Andrew Tate. Clueless, The Musical opened in London just as Adolescence hit our TV screens, the darkly topical story of 13-year old Jamie lost in online misogyny. Next to damaged boys like Jamie, Cher’s braggish suitor Elton is a pussycat.
By contrast, when Mean Girls: The Musical opened in London last year, it tried to tell a 2004 story with 2024 technology. In Meet The Plastics, an introductory number for the story’s frostiest girl-gang, anti-heroine Regina George boasts that “the filters you use all look just like me”. We’re in the world of Instagram and Snapchat and we’re told these are the cruellest teenagers known to man. Yet, while they still construct a pen-and-paper “burn book” of rumours about their classmates, not one Photoshops their victims into pornography.
I do appreciate that delving fully into the world of digital sex crime might not make for the upbeat story most audiences have come to see in the West End. It does speak to the difficulty of remaking analogue tales of adolescence in a digital world. This week, Mean Girls: The Musical announced closing notices. It’s probably relevant that I couldn’t remember a single catchy song, but it also seemed to fall irredeemably between two stools. Was it a tale of adolescence past, or present?
The issue of social media isn’t the only challenge that these teen comedies dodge. Both Mean Girls and Clueless excise any reference to a character offending a protected class, which means we lose the epic description of Christian as a “disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy”. (Surely, what matters in the movie is that Cher immediately accepts him as a friend?) Cher’s most shameful moment no longer includes an expression of racism towards her housekeeper, perhaps because a modern audience would find it harder to accept her atonement.
The result is a rose-tinted, effervescent show that avoids any relationship with modern reality. Our nostalgia for 90s films is a nostalgia for a simpler teenage time. At some point, however, we can no longer keep rehashing the same teen stories. Some darker musicals have begun to explore growing up online: Dear Evan Hansen and Be More Chill come to mind. Are we ready for Euphoria: The Musical, in the spirit of the cult TV series about school-age pill-popping and sexual violence? I’d rather stay in the spirit of 1995.
• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
