William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Mean Girls

February 15, 2019
Tina Fey's Mean Girls gets a Shakespearean script treatment. As in the 2004 film, home-schooled teenager Cady Heron leaves Africa with her anthropologist parents and enters American high school, where she first spies on popular Plastics-leader Regina George, then emulates the queen bee, alienating her newfound real friends, Damian and Janis, and crush, Aaron. No mere novelization of the movie (itself based on a nonfiction book), it embraces Elizabethan theater conventions, with Doescher (Jedi the Last, 2018, etc.) translating cinematic tropes and tricks into their early modern equivalents--asides, chorus, and balcony scenes. Blatantly lifting speeches from the Bard, other lines swing between jarringly modern and pseudo-Shakespearean, with the juxtaposition played for comedic effect. The iambic pentameter (mostly prose) usually works, in style if not in syntax. Purists may scoff, but this play attempts and mostly succeeds at reviving Shakespeare as popular entertainment for the masses. Audiences already familiar with the film's plots, memorable lines, and pop-culture references will be well-equipped to tackle the Shakespearean treatment rather than facing an impenetrable thicket of academic allusions, archaic language, history lessons, and Latin grammar jokes. However, the author's afterword assertion that "Shakespeare's female characters were never as strong as those of Tina Fey's creation" better befits the Burn Book's slander.Creating a modern Shakespeare play is no Mean feat. (dramatis personae, afterword, sonnet) (Fiction. 12-18)

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March 15, 2019
In a near scene-by-scene re-creation of Mean Girls, Doescher, author of the William Shakespeare's Star Wars series, gives Tina Fey's 2004 film a Shakespearean twist. It's not much of a leap: the movie, a tale of warring teen royalty at an affluent high school, is packed with betrayals, glamour, subterfuge, and savage one-liners?the stuff of Shakespeare's dreams. The plot remains essentially the same, as homeschooled Cady Heron attends high school for the first time at 16, and is caught up in the lives of the Plastics, the most popular?and most vicious?girls in school. Doescher adapts stage directions from twentieth-century screen to Elizabethan stage, rewrites iconic movie lines in Shakespearean rhyme and meter ("I am no mother regular, forsooth! / A cool mom I, 'tis so"), and links each of his female characters to one of Shakespeare's actual heroines ("O brave new world, / That has such people in it!" exclaims Cady when arriving at school, borrowing from The Tempest's Miranda). Primarily a novelty purchase, but one that will delight with its depth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)