We watched ‘Mean Girls’ with a very smart teen. Here is what she thought.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Tina Fey’s Mean Girls was released, but the pink universe has kept growing, from a lackluster sequel attempt to a Broadway musical. Now on its second national tour, the Mean Girls musical — running at the Miller Theater through Oct. 8. — is getting even more attention because the movie adaptation, Mean Girls: The Musical, will be out in January.

In this girl-eat-girl world, The Inquirer invited Rowan Arthur, 16, a junior at Girls’ High who works at the city-wide student newspaper The Bullhorn, to review the show. Here are six takeaways from our conversation.

Though stereotypical, the clique culture Mean Girls portrays is still “very very prevalent,” said Arthur. In the song, “Where Do You Belong?” Damian (Friends Select alum Ethan Jih-Cook) and Janis (Alexys Morera) introduce Cady (Natalie Shaw) to the student hierarchy in the cafeteria. There are the jocks, Mathletes, debate team, and most importantly, the Plastics led by Regina George (Maya Petropoulos). Arthur, a proud debate club member, said she sees similar divisions persist in Girls’ High and elsewhere — and the mean girls never really go away.

“When you think you can trust somebody but they talk behind your back, sometimes you can feel like a Cady in a world full of Reginas,” Arthur said.

What’s the 2023 version of “fetch”? Gretchen Wieners (Kristen Amanda Smith) said “slay,” which earned an eye-roll from Arthur. “Ughhh, it makes me so mad when ‘slay’ and ‘yaasss,’ like [African American Vernacular English] is the only language to describe young people,” she said. “It feels like a Millennial wrote this musical and did not ask the opinion of Gen Z.” Damian joked that kids get into car accidents for boomerangs (a feature on Instagram and Snapchat) — not TikToks. That’s so 2017!

(At 53, Fey, the Upper Darby native who wrote the book, is technically Gen X.)

Arthur admits that she’s more of a play person than a musical person, but she felt like there were too many songs and the show was overly long at 150 minutes. “Whenever some good conversation was going on, there was a song,” she said.

The reprise of “What’s Wrong With Me?” has Gretchen duet with Mrs. George (Kristen Seggio) as they both wonder why Regina lashes out at those closest to her. “That could have been a really great moment to explain the hurt that Regina has caused so many people in her life in a really meaningful way. It’s not even like I didn’t like the song, but I just felt that it was just like a really cheap way to segue into the conversation,” said Arthur.

Of course, the songs are the whole point of a musical, and Arthur really enjoyed (some of) the music and choreography. “The orchestra ate,” were her exact words. She recognized Regina’s entrance song “World Burn” from TikTok, where the original movie soundtrack plays with fan cams of Rachel McAdams. The lyrics go, “My name is Regina George / And I am a massive deal.”

Part of why Arthur wanted more spoken dialogue than singing was due to sound production challenges. There were a couple moments where the mics cut out and sometimes it was tough to catch every word.

Gretchen and Karen (MaryRose Brendel) were Arthur’s favorite characters because they were complex and illustrated “the multifaceted behavior of young women.” Gretchen is a people-pleaser who pretends everything is “fetch” when she’s really facing destabilizing insecurities. “She is kind of like me in the sense that she’s very idealistic about her friends,” said Arthur. “I relate to doing things to make your so-called friends enjoy your persona.”

Everyone dismisses Karen as dumb — and the character is funnier and more developed in the musical than the movie — but underneath the spacey exterior, she can be insightful. “There’s so many people that I know who think that they’re dumb when they have real power in their voices,” Arthur said.

Though it’s a lighthearted musical, Arthur expected conversations about toxic friendships and vicious high school girls to resonate more, especially since mean girls in real life have compelling reasons for acting harshly while Regina remains one-dimensional.

“I thought we were gonna have deep philosophical questions to ask ourselves and I’m seeing people humping in a lion costume,” she said, referring to when Cady ratted out Regina for cheating on Aaron (Joseph Torres). (To be clear, it was an actor mimicking having sex in the mascot costume.)

Overall, the musical “didn’t feel as iconic as the movie” to Arthur, who first saw Mean Girls when she was around 10, the same year the musical premiered. Does she plan to see the upcoming movie adaptation?

“I will only watch it if there is a lion,” she said, laughing. “If ‘Lion suit???’ is not trending on Twitter, I’m not gonna see it.”

‘Mean Girls’ runs through Oct. 8 at the Miller Theater, 250 S. Broad St., Phila., 215-893-1999 or kimmelculturalcampus.org.