On Wednesdays — and Saturdays — we wear pink: CMTS’s 24 Hour Musical ‘Mean Girls’

After a mere 24 hours of rehearsal, the Columbia Musical Theatre Society’s “Mean Girls” left the audience in Lerner’s Black Box Theatre grinning and thinking, “Grool!”

Photo provided by OKR

By Julieta Skallman

March 8, 2026

When a production frankly does not have the time to run through the motions time and again, things will go wrong, and that was part of the beauty in watching a CMTS 24 Hour Musical.

During the second half of CMTS’s 24 Hour Musical production of “Mean Girls,” a voice from the ether interrupted Ms. Norbury, played by Justine Dugger-Ades (CC ’26), mid-conversation with Cady. The audience tensed, knowing that this was not part of the show. It is to Dugger-Ades’ credit that, after a tiny hesitation, Ms. Norbury looked back at Cady and improvised, “That’s the principal [played by Sara Rose (BC ’28)]! We have a new sound system — it happens all the time.” And just like that, the audience laughed, and the show went on.

As Chloe Lein (GS ’26), the producer of “Mean Girls”, put it, “Sometimes you have to play it by ear and be flexible, and that goes for producing all the time. Something’s going to go wrong and especially for 24 Hour. It’s no big deal.”

The Columbia Musical Theatre Society — the oldest recognized student group that regularly mounts musical revivals at Columbia University — started the 24 Hour tradition in 2018. The 24 Hour Musical consists of just that: a musical is cast at 8 p.m., rehearsed all night and the following day, and is performed 24 hours later. Since its beginning, there have been seven 24 Hour Musicals. The most recent of these was “Mean Girls,” which took place on Saturday, February 28 in Lerner’s Black Box Theatre.

In order to pull off an uncut, but slightly altered, “Mean Girls,” the CMTS 24 Hour Musical took over Lerner’s fifth floor starting Friday evening. The only significant pause the cast and crew took was from 4-8:30 a.m., marked in the show’s schedule in big, bold letters saying, “SLEEP!”

The production took over one to five rooms at a time, one room holding a pit rehearsal, another running scenes, and another working on choreography — and so the 24 hours sped by, but not without a few hiccups along the way. 

When asked what the most challenging part of the show was, Lein answered, “Definitely the scheduling. Quite the monster, as we like to say. To help out, we have co-directors [Lúcia Towne (BC ’26) and Molly Hahn (SEAS ’27)], co-choreographers [Belle Reeves (CC ’29) and Julian Rodriguez (CC ’28)], and co-music directors [Lucas Keeley (CC ’29) and Diego Carvajal Núñez (CC ’27)] — who are leading rehearsals — and so that makes things a little easier scheduling-wise, in terms of we don’t have one music director teaching all the songs for 24 hours straight, and that lets everyone have their sleep break.”

I was able to shortly shadow Lein on Saturday morning. She led me from Lerner’s Black Box Theatre, where the ensemble was learning the background singing for “Revenge Party,” to a room where part of the ensemble were sitting in a circle learning a scene. 

Another space was reserved as a Review Room — in which, as Lein explained it, the actors could go and review parts of the show. And then Lein got a text: the people in a third rehearsal needed another actor. This kicked off Lein having to continuously jump between rehearsals for the next five minutes.

Thus, the cast and crew of “Mean Girls” spent Friday night and all of Saturday rehearsing, pausing only for the four-hour sleep break, a half-hour lunch break, and an hour-long dinner break. Before they knew it, it was showtime.

At around 7:30 p.m., the audience filed into the Black Box Theatre and smiled on noticing the pit and crew wearing pink in reference to the iconic “Mean Girls” line, “On Wednesdays we wear pink!” It was before a full house that co-directors Lúcia Towne and Molly Hahn introduced the show, warning the audience that heavy props would be brought on and off stage, with Towne adding, “You will get run over if you are not cautious” — a quip about Regina George’s fate near the end of “Mean Girls” which was hilariously done in this musical, with three giggling cast members embodying a bus.

The 24 Hour Musical itself was, as “Mean Girls” is at its core and is meant to be, a little messy and very funny. “Whose House Is This?” was a highlight: led by Kevin Gnapoor, played by Ida Santiago-Gutierrez (BC ’26). The ensemble fully committed to the bit, and the audience was hooting and hollering as people leapt across the stage and flung themselves onto the floor to do the worm.

The main roles — Regina, played by Charlotte Hart (BC ’26) and Alexi Arocho (CC ’29); Cady, played by Zoe Haynes (CC ’29) and Marina Chamedes (BC ’29); and Damian, Jorim Chua (GS ’28) and Ben Miner (CC ’28) — being double cast was a necessity for a show mounted in a single day. “We also double cast a few roles … so that they can be rehearsing different scenes for those characters at the same time,” said Lein. 

She added that, “For someone like Cady, who’s on stage all the time, sometimes you need three or four Cadys, and we only have two, so definitely that scheduling was very difficult.” Yet both Cadys shined: Haynes played naïveté which grew into cold teenagehood with the appropriate innocent smiles and consequent disregard for other people; Chamedes delivered a beautiful vocal performance throughout the show, notably performing “Stupid With Love” with a voice filled with infatuation.

In fact, every actor did justice to these iconic characters despite the very limited prep time: Arocho’s Regina let out a perfectly shrill scream on finding out that she had been tricked into eating Kälteen bars to gain weight; Hart’s lazy stride embodied Regina’s cockiness, and her “World Burn” was wonderfully dramatic. Miner’s Damian tap danced through “Stop” the way only someone too gay to function could; Chua’s flamboyance shined as he sang “Where Do You Belong?”

Isabella Soto (BC ’29) might not have had the time to memorize the entirety of “I’d Rather Be Me,” but, regardless, and, in true Janis fashion, she confidently stuck her right finger in the air. Norah Mukana’s (CC ’29) portrayal of Karen in “Sexy” was perfectly ditzy and utterly hilarious, and she sang nasally and walked as if she was floating. Anxiety pervaded Ymanie Kenan’s (CC ’26) Gretchen, and, with a nervous voice and hunched shoulders, she delivered a solid “What’s Wrong With Me?” 

If anything faltered in this production, it was that at moments throughout the production, the pit overpowered the actors’ voices. The audience could see actors’ mouths moving but not hear a thing over the music. That being said, the pit was consistently great throughout the show, and, in fact, actors kept glancing over at the conductor — one of the music directors, Diego Carvajal Núñez — if they were unsure about their lines.

There is no way a production executed in 24 hours could be perfect, and CMTS’s “Mean Girls” never tried to be. This is something everyone knew going into “Mean Girls,” and such is the charm of the 24 Hour Musical. “The really fun challenge for 24 Hour is that it’s a small budget; it’s a fast production; it’s basically making whatever you can work in that 24 hour time period … it’s just a really fun time,” Lein said. If the hollering laughs from the audience or the grinning cast and crew were any indication, any imperfections were not the weaknesses of this production — they were the point.