New York • The last time we left "Mean Girls," in those clique-obsessed classrooms at North Shore High — well, actually, in Washington's National Theatre — the musical's creative team, led by nonpareil comedy writer Tina Fey, was facing some major homework. The score by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin contained some serious misfires, and several of the central characters seemed marooned from the kind of precision-guided character-delineating material a satire of adolescent social cruelty has to feature.
So here this show on choreographic hyper-drive lands, five months later — and what an enjoyable completion of the assignment the creative team has handed in, all to the benefit of your experience in the modern Darwinian teenage zone of mock-or-be-mocked, of dress-to-kill-or-be-pilloried.