The Mean Girls of Poudre High School got a nice surprise this week when Tina Fey dropped them an Instagram video wishing them well on their upcoming production of her hit musical, “Mean Girls.” 

In the message, the comedy superstar tells the Fort Collins students she is honored they are doing her show in November. She tells them to break a leg and to “have so much fun.”

And she left the Impalas with some practical advice that everyone in the audience will surely appreciate.

“Just remember to do your scene changes really fast and really tight,” Fey says, “because that makes or breaks a high school show – trust me.”

She should know. Fey is a former youth theater director herself.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

Standing behind Fey in the video is Poudre High School sophomore Charlotte Baker, who is playing Cady Heron in the school’s production of “Mean Girls the High School Version” from Nov. 3-11.

“It’s all very cool and very exciting,” Poudre High theater director Joel Smith said of the video.

Charlotte’s mother, Dana Baker, is friends with a member of the backstage crew working Fey and Amy Poehler’s current Restless Leg Tour, Smith said. This friend landed tickets for the Bakers to attend the Oct. 1 tour stop at the Bellco Theatre in Denver.

When the tour worker mentioned to Fey that her friend’s daughter was involved in a high-school production of “Mean Girls,” the pair were given backstage passes, “and Tina said she wanted to meet them,” Smith said. In fact, it was Fey’s idea to make the Instagram video shoutout, Smith said.

“Tina was the most gracious, encouraging, and lovely human,” Dana Baker wrote on Instagram. “Poudre Theatre is going to crush it!”

The “Mean Girls” stage musical is based on the 2004 film that grossed more than $128 million at the box office. It tells the story of Cady Heron, who finds herself in a suburban Illinois public high school after years of being home-schooled on the African savanna. Confronted with the animalistic social order of American teenagers, Cady devises a plan to topple the school’s queen bee, Regina George, and her cohorts: The Plastics.

Fey’s adaptation bowed on Broadway in 2018, where it made another $124 million.

When Broadway musicals are eventually licensed to high schools, they almost always come with mandatory revisions tailored to teenage performers. “Mean Girls” is the first Broadway musical to give schools the full, unedited script – along with a list of approved changes that each school can then decide whether to use, based on their own community’s sensibilities.

“I’ve been looking forward to high-school productions of ‘Mean Girls’ from the day we opened on Broadway,” Fey told Playbill magazine. “As a former drama-club member, I knew that a show with five female leads would be great news for most schools. I hoped that letting students play characters their own age, with a story they can relate to, would be fun and lead to some great conversations.”

Fey’s Broadway adaptation of “Mean Girls” found widespread audience appeal because unlike, say, Stephen King’s “Carrie,” the nasty kids don’t end up fried in the high-school gym in the end. Instead, they are redeemed. That’s because “Mean Girls” is about more than just the mean girls.

“Oh, there are many mean people in high school,” Jeff Richmond, who wrote the music for “Mean Girls” (and is married to Fey), told me in a previous interview. “But there are also very sweet people, and very broken people, and very hurt people, too. And with this musical, we are trying to give all of them a voice and a sense of self-importance.”

The irony of the musical’s title, Richmond said, “is that the show is so joyful and so much fun. The title does hang on that one word – mean – but there’s so much more to it than that.”

For more information on Poudre High’s upcoming production, go to poudretheatre.org.