The Mean Girls Movie Musical Restores A Deleted Scene To Offer More Closure
This article contains spoilers for "Mean Girls."
The 2024 movie musical reimagining of "Mean Girls" restores a missing puzzle piece in the original film. Penned by Tina Fey and directed by Mark Waters, the original "Mean Girls" is a cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of cliques. Having grown up homeschooled, Cady (Lindsay Lohan) is figuring out how to survive in the jungle of a Chicago public high school. She befriends two outcasts, Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), who recruit her to infiltrate the Plastics, a pink-clad clique of popular girls ruled by Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Cady finds herself allured by Regina's seemingly titanic confidence — that is, until Regina steals Cady's crush, locking the two teens in a vicious cycle of revenge.
Eventually, these incidents come to a boil when Regina is accidentally hit by a bus. When a recuperating Regina attends the Spring Fling, Cady symbolically bestows pieces of her Spring Fling crown to her competitors, including her former foe Regina, as a gesture of reconciliation. After their quarrel and the bus accident, you would think Regina would have some words for Cady, but they have nary a conversation together. At least, not in the theatrical version of the film.
The Queen Bee had a heart all along
If you sensed that a pivotal heart-to-heart between Regina and Cady didn't make the final cut, you're right on the money. One of the film's deleted scenes has Cady attempting to deliver amends and flowers to a bedridden Regina, only to flee the mansion upon hearing Regina shriek over the sight of medically prescribed Kälteen Bars.
More intriguing, however, is the deleted scene where they finally get to make amends as Cady encounters Regina, in a spinal halo, in the restroom moments before the Spring Fling crowning. There, Regina absolves Cady of fault over the bus accident while also forgiving Cady for her genuine transgressions against her (well, Regina credits the painkillers for her forgiving "zen" state). The former queen bee also offers an indirect apology for stealing Cady's crush by comparing it to a childhood incident where her seven-year-old self destroyed an expensive dollhouse — one she didn't even want — just so her cousin couldn't have it. The two exchange a genuine chuckle over the story, cementing that Regina recognizes the absurdity of her self-absorptive, possessive behavior in both her childhood and teenhood.
Restoring the reconciliation
Fey adapted her original screenplay into the book for the "Mean Girls" stage musical (which ran on Broadway from 2018 to 2021), and it seems she realized she could resuscitate the reconciliation between Cady (Erika Henningsen) and a humbled Regina (Taylor Louderman) with updated dialogue. The older film clocks in at 97 minutes, while the musical passes the two-hour mark, so there's more breathing space for the restroom scene.
The musical script explicitly attests that Regina's near-death experience reminded her of her own humanity, and she claims she glimpsed Heaven as a "nice hotel in Miami" during her 15 seconds of death. Although there's no dollhouse anecdote, she also shares that her mother (Kerry Butler on Broadway) would have named her "Reginald," a good name for strength, if she were a boy, illustrating how she shouldered the pressures of greatness. Regina passes Cady sincere life advice to not care about what people think. She also adds, "That's what I tried to explain to the President [Donald Trump] on Twitter but he blocked me." Sans the Trump comment, most of Cady and Regina's conversation is carried over into the 2024 "Mean Girls" movie musical adaptation, with Reneé Rapp (the replacement for Louderman on Broadway) as Regina and Angourie Rice as Cady.
Admittedly, I miss the dollhouse tale since it landed as a compelling shorthand for Regina's psychology and how pettiness is so humanly primal from the cradle to adulthood. Still, Cady and Regina have come a long way to make peace.
The "Mean Girls" movie musical is now playing in theaters.