And through this process, Hassan was able to be booked as Regina George.

“I’ve been a fan of Mean Girls since I was a kid,” Hassan said. “The movie came out when I was old enough to watch it. I totally fell in love with it. It is so iconic in film canons. Everyone knows it. It is so quotable. It is so relatable for everyone. And Regina George is incredibly iconic. She’s the queen bee. I’ve known about the role through musicals since I was in college. It is just so amazing. I’ve been a fan of Taylor Louderman for as long as I can remember. And so it is kind of an honor to be able to continue this character and this story.”

While Regina could be played very stereotypically, Hassan gives her depth and humanity.

“Regina definitely has a lot of humanity,” Hassan said. “They all do. In the end, they all show their real true colors and strip away all of the stuff that has been happening during the show. But she is very mean spirited, intuitive, very conniving, and very intelligent. Her relationship with every character is very, very different. And that manifests in how they behave with one another and how Cady Heron eventually rises to the top and all of the downfall of that.”

While Hassan came to musical theater early in life, Morgan Ashley Bryant, who plays Karen Smith, was a relative latecomer to the stage. She was a literature major at the University of Alabama when she decided she wanted to take a dance class. Bryant had to audition even though she had taken lessons at a dance studio during high school.

“I asked the head of the dance department at the University of Alabama if I could take a class,” Bryant said. “He said, ‘Well you have to audition. I can’t just let you take a class because the class is for dance majors.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I went to audition to be in this class. Afterwards, he was like, ‘Come here. You want to be a dance major? I think I’m going to make you a dance major. Come with me.’ He wrote out the forms and didn’t really ask me. He said, ‘You’re a dance major.’ I was like, ‘Okay, great.’ I dropped my literature major and became a dance major. I called my mom and she was like, ‘Okay?’”

After graduation, Bryant made her way to New York before the pandemic.

“I moved to New York in 2019 and started going to a bunch of auditions,” Bryant recalled. “MEAN GIRLS was one that I went to and they kept on calling me back. I thought it was crazy. For my first audition, I booked it for the ensemble. They kept calling me back and I thought, ‘I know they are going to take a pass on me. This isn’t really going to happen.’ I got the offer and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was for my first collective year because we had the pandemic in between that I was in the ensemble. I was understudying Karen. I sent in my tape when they were auditioning for Karen when we were leaving for tour. And I became Karen.”

Karen Smith, on the surface, is a woman who plays dumb in order to get by in high school and life. But there is a lot going on beneath the surface.

“I think Karen has a lot of depth to her,” Bryant said. “Of all of The Plastics, I think Karen might be in the most emotionally intelligent way. She is a little bit innocent. She might not be the smartest, book smart, but I think she has a lot of kindness, even though she is a little bit mean as all three of The Plastics are. But I think each of The Plastics have their own depth. None of The Plastics are superficial and that is it. I think that is the whole point of this play. No one is as they seem from the outside looking in. And there is always depth to people. And I think Karen is very emotionally intelligent.”

Jasmine Rogers, who plays Gretchen Wieners, has been involved in musical theater since she was around seven-years-old when she begged her mother to let her try out for Peter Pan and landed a role in the ensemble. In her senior year, she played The Witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and won several awards and was a finalist in the national Jimmy Awards. It was the affirmation that she needed to pursue a career in musical theater and attended the Manhattan School of Music for two years before dropping out to pursue her career.

“If I wanted to, I could always come back to the conservancy,” Rogers said. “I decided to start auditioning because I really couldn’t do both at that school. I had two lead jobs, but I had to choose one and I ended up choosing Becoming Nancy, which was my first professional show and I got to originate a role in that show. It was really amazing. It was regional theater. It opened at the Alliance Theater, which is in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a Jerry Mitchell show. Jerry Mitchell is in charge of choreography. He did Legally Blonde and Hair Spray. He’s a really amazing guy.”

And she had her eye on a role in MEAN GIRLS.

“I’ve actually been auditioning for this show for a couple of years,” Rogers admitted. “I was auditioning for the Broadway play when it was still open. I was auditioning for Gretchen. I didn’t get it, but that was okay because then the pandemic happened unfortunately and the show ended up closing. But I continued to audition when the tour was opening up. I was auditioning for Regina. And then eventually I kind of moved on to the next thing and I was working on The Wanderer at People Mill Playhouse, which is another show that I got to originate a role in. I was headed to a rehearsal one day and I got a call on the train that I had booked Gretchen Wieners and it was mine if I wanted it on the tour. I said yes because holy cow. And here we are. It was really amazing to get the full actor experience. Sometimes you don’t work back-to-back, but to get a job right at the end of your other job, it was really, really cool and affirming, especially coming out of the pandemic.”

In Rogers’ view, Gretchen is someone whom everyone can identify with.