Princesses
5th Avenue Theatre
Through Aug 28.

In a town where most theater feels focus-grouped for fiftysomethings, it's almost refreshing to see a show that openly courts teen girls. Princesses' Metro bus ads do all right—pink, black, plenty of sass—and on opening night, the 5th Avenue Theatre was packed with high-school kids dressed like they were on their way to junior prom. But the show itself isn't worth getting your hair done for.

In Princesses, which is here for another weekend before it's exported to an uncertain future on Broadway, Jenny Fellner plays the daughter of an action-movie hunk who's just enrolled her in a cliquey boarding school. The half-assed plot has her pining after some quality time with Dad (the irritating Brent Barrett), spurning the high-school musical (an adaptation of A Little Princess), then starring in the musical (now directed by her supposedly neglectful father), then contemplating ditching out on the musical (her movie-star boyfriend wants to bone her in Paris), and then starring in the damn musical again. Oh yeah, and her mom just died. The awful set looks like it sprang from an '80s music video. The book is more concerned with glib topical references to gay dads and arts funding in the schools than it is with developing the characters.

Princesses wants to be Mean Girls with a gooey center, but the gooeyness isn't credible and the meanness is vague. The music is short on hooks and trenchant barbs alike. The only number that really works is "What a Drag," a lament about being typecast as a man and/or monkey—and that's thanks to a winning performance by Lindsay Mendez and a horrifyingly perfect monkey suit, designed by William Ivey Long. The song itself, which concerns the innate feminine desire to be swathed in pounds of ruffles, is sort of dumb.