The Year of the Theatre Girl

2024 is the year of the grapevine.

When Ariana Grande announced her next single “yes, and?” there was an obvious follow-up question: was she entering her improv era? Would we be treated to further singles with titles like “What’s my Line?” and “Zip Zap Zop?” 

Those predictions may have missed the mark when it comes to the single itself, which is an empowerment anthem blending a throbbing house beat with Grande’s airy vocals. But the video, with its cringe-inducing opening scene of “critics” lamenting the disappearance of “the old Ari,” eventually reveals itself as something rather wonderful: an homage to Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted” video and a declaration that 2023 is the year of the theatre girl.

Fitted head-to-toe in a rehearsal look that can be seen right this moment in any high school black box theatre in America, Grande reminds us that before she was HBIC of Arianator Nation, she was a theatre kid. This is the woman who, during the pandemic, performed Jason Robert Brown songs on Zoom and mounted a one-woman production of “Won’t Say I’m in Love” from Hercules (which is tragically still un-streamable on Spotify). Kicking around an empty warehouse in her leotard and LaDuca character shoes, the Ariana of 2024 is fully leaning into her truest self, kicking off a year that will see many of us embracing our own theatrical origins.

Consider that Grande’s new song dropped the same day that Mean Girls, a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a movie, was released in theatres. Much has been made of the current trend for Hollywood to market musicals as regular films to avoid scaring away jazz hand haters, but this tactic has no staying power. The moment Nicole Kidman finishes her monologue and the movie starts, you’re very aware you’re seeing a musical. And at my screening yesterday, not one person got up and left when the grapevines started! Could it be that most of the audience wanted, nay, intended to see a musical?

Mean Girls is…fine. It’s fun, but it’s a pale imitation of the film that inspired it, and adding musical numbers doesn’t enhance the story. Many of the iconic lines from the original film are still spoken rather than adapted into song, and any new humor added by the nature of the form is mild at best. The cast is talented, particularly Auliʻi Cravalho as Janice. Reneé Rapp has a lovely voice but is seemingly allergic to consonants, each of her songs blowing by as one long echo of vowel sounds. There are moments of promise, but so much of the gleeful nastiness of the original has been sanded down to make the story more palatable for an assumedly hyper-vigilant woke 2024 audience that the girls end up not being all that mean. What’s the point?

But while the year is beginning with a lackluster movie musical no one asked for, it’s building to one over 20 years in the making. There’s a reason Grande looks so at home in a rehearsal studio, and that’s because she’s spent the past year prepping for the big screen adaptation of Wicked, finally out November 27…allegedly. I’ll believe it when I’m fully reclined at Regal Essex and Grande descends into the frame in her bubble and not a moment sooner! 

It’s undeniable, though, that Wicked mania will build inexorably this year to a fever pitch, unleashing the theatre girl that lives inside most of us, no matter how hard we’ve tried to deny, starve, or murder her. Grande is smart to use her new single to launch not only her next pop era but the next phase of her career as a movie star, one who is finally making (For) good on her childhood dreams. She’s not just a sentient ponytail, she’s not just Mrs. Squarepants, she’s a theatre girl. And this year, that’s not a bad thing to be.