Submitted photo From left, Tom Millsap-Kijauskas is Damian, Natalina Kazimir is Cady and Carolyn Colley is Janis in Millennial Theatre Company’s production of “Mean Girls,” which opens April 17.

Millennial Theatre Company had a list of three musicals that, whenever they became available, the theater would drop whatever it had scheduled in order to do them.

Two of those shows became part of its 2025-26 season. “Dear Evan Hanson” will be staged this summer, and the musical “Mean Girls” opens April 17 on the main stage at Youngstown Playhouse for a six-performance run.

The third is “Waitress: The Musical,” which just announced another tour, so MTC Director Joe Asente doesn’t expect it to be available anytime soon, but “Mean Girls” has been high on his wish list for a long time, and it arrived just in time.

“Every generation has its quintessential, classic high school movie, and for the millennial generation, that’s ‘Mean Girls,'” Asente said. “That was the movie that kind of defined what our high school experience was like. Being able to bring that to life on stage is something that we really wanted to be the theater company to do.

“But we also knew that our clock was kind of ticking on it, because most of us are in our 30s now, so our days of playing high schoolers are, if they’re not already behind us, we’re nearing those days. We knew that if it didn’t happen in the next couple of years, it wasn’t going to, so as soon as we knew when it was going to become available, we knew that we needed to do it as soon as we could.”

“Mean Girls” is based on the 2004 movie about Cady Heron, a teenager who enrolls in an American high school after being homeschooled for more than a decade in Africa by her zoologist parents. She infiltrates “The Plastics,” a trio of popular girls who dominate the school, and becomes both seduced by their power and the target of their rage when she attracts the attention of the ex-boyfriend of the Plastics’ leader, Regina George.

Tina Fey co-wrote the film and wrote the book for the musical with her husband, Garrettsville native Tim Richmond, writing the music and Nell Benjamin writing the lyrics.

It ran for two years on Broadway and received 12 Tony Award nominations.

MTC’s regulars weren’t the only ones anxious to do the musical. Because it’s the first production in Ohio, Asente said they had people from as far away as Mansfield audition.

“It was probably the biggest turnout we’ve had since coming back from COVID,” he said. “The source material speaks so deeply to everybody. We really got to be picky about everything. Something that I always love to do in an audition process, is really just sit down and think about everything from every angle, rather than trying to just make something work. And we’ve got a really stacked cast here.”

The cast includes Natalina Kazimir, Karina Moran, Carolyn Colley, Tom Millsap Kijauskas, Karlina Valley, Trudi Herrholtz, Sam Early, Roz Blystone, Arcale Peace, Erik Anderson, Austin Berriger, : Sage Mason, Emalee Chappa, Ashley Conway, Carly Delliquadri, Sammie Gurd, Danny Stephenson, Brendan Bishop, Kieran Sears, Paula Stephenson, Michelle Jalbert, Landon Eli, Edward Bazzell, Steve Millsap-Kijauskas, Andrew Baumeier and Emma James

Cari Auth is the music director, Colleen Chance is choreographer, Ty Hanes is costumer and Renee Pospisal is stage manager.

That stacked cast is necessary because of the caliber of the show’s music, according to Asente.

“I think there’s a tendency in high school-based stories to have a very pop kind of sound,” he said. “Think ‘Heathers’ or even a little bit of ‘Be More Chill.’ Every song in those shows is kind of one note, for a lack of a better term. And I think one of the things that ‘Mean Girls’ does well is it has a little bit of every genre in it. You’ve got a song that sounds like a James Bond theme song. You’ve got songs that are classic Broadway musical theater with a capital B. You have some songs that are more pop based. You have songs that are more high energy dance numbers that’s more like a hip hop sound.

“There’s such a wide range of options in the soundtrack for this show that I think it really does appeal to everyone. I think that the music really just has the ability to kind of transcend a lot of the stereotypes of the typical high school show … The music is complicated. There’s no way around that. And the main characters all need to be powerhouse singers.”

The musical updated some of the references from the 2004 movie and social media plays a prominent role.

The musical also breaks the fourth wall with Janis and Damian, two high school outcasts who become Cady’s first friends at her new school, addressing the audience members as if they are incoming freshmen and seeing the story as a cautionary tale as part of freshman orientation.

Asente let that framing device influence the way the show is staged.

“It’s very much designed to be like a high school theatrical presentation,” he said. “Everything is not fully realized. There’s bits and pieces of everything that come in and out, because that’s how it would be done if Janis and Damian were directing this high school version of the retelling of the story … It’s still done on a large scale. There’s more moving pieces in the show than any other show we’ve done, but the setting is very suggested, rather than literally interpreted.”

In addition to the set pieces that had to be built, MTC rented the projections from the original Broadway production to use for the local staging.

The size of the production, particularly the size of the cast needed, dictated why MTC slotted “Mean Girls” in the spring and scheduled “Dear Evan Hansen” in the summer to end the season.

“We have found the last couple of summers, where our usual big show slot resided, it’s been increasingly more difficult to get everybody in one room at the same time over the summer because of vacations and all kinds of other obligations that are popping up,” Asente said. “We made the decision about a year ago that we wanted to transition away from the large cast summer musicals and put the larger show of our season in the spring. ‘Mean Girls’ is a very large show, so we knew the place where it made the most sense for us would be the spring slot.”

If you go …

WHAT: Millennial Theatre Company — “Mean Girls”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. April 17, 18, 24 and 25 and 2:30 p.m. April 19 and 26

WHERE: Youngstown Playhouse, 600 Playhouse Lane, Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $27 and are available online at experienceyourarts.org and by calling 330-259-9651.