School girls, including the ones in Ghana, apparently haven’t gotten any less mean since Jocelyn Bioh’s raucous comedy received its world premiere in 2017 by off-Broadway’s MCC Theater. Now making its belated Broadway debut in a new production directed by Whitney White (Liberation, The Last Five Years) and featuring some genuine ringers in its cast, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play has lost none of its sharp comic bite.
The 1986-set play immediately establishes that the school’s reigning queen bee is Paulina (Denée Benton, The Gilded Age) having a ball with her character’s villainy, who has a soccer-playing boyfriend and clearly has the best chance of being selected as the year’s Miss Ghana. Paulina has a devoted posse who she lords over, although often not very nicely as evidenced by her verbal abuse of the overweight Nana (Erin Morton, Heathers the Musical, nearly stealing the show). “I’ve decided you can’t be part of the group anymore,” she tells Nana. “You’re not really mixing with our aesthetic.”
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Paulina’s position at the top of the pecking order becomes threatened by the unexpected arrival of Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers, as charming here as she was in Boop), a Ghanaian-born student who has returned to her homeland after years spent in America. Gorgeous, light-skinned and extremely personable, Ericka quickly captivates the girls who eagerly take her up on her offer to come to her dorm room for a makeover party. Paulina, so self-conscious about her dark skin that she once injured herself by applying bleaching cream to her face, realizes that Ericka could be formidable competition and orders Nana to purloin her rival’s file from the office of the school’s headmistress (Heather Alicia Sims, Purlie Victorious).
Paulina’s fear proves prescient with the arrival of Eloise (a regal Patina Miller, Pippin), the pageant’s recruiter who, as we’re constantly reminded, was herself Miss Ghana 1966. When Eloise spots Ericka she immediately sees the beautiful young woman as her own stepping stone to a promotion. “We are just looking for girls that fall on the other end of the African skin spectrum,” she informs the headmistress. But her plan becomes complicated by damaging information in Ericka’s personal file that Paulina is happy to exploit.
Bioh — a Ghanaian-American actress who’s appeared in such plays as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, An Octoroon, and Everybody and who will soon briefly play Eloise while Patina takes a planned break for a prior commitment — made an auspicious playwriting debut with this uproarious comedy that also pulls at the heartstrings. The clever writing features plenty of astute period-appropriate touches, such as the girls’ nearly falling over when informed that R&B singer Bobby Brown will be performing at the beauty pageant. Their group rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” as an audition piece, in which Ericka dramatically proves that her vocal talent matches her beauty, proves a show-stopping highlight, with Rogers bringing the house down.
White, who also directed Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at the same theater, provides a fast-paced staging that makes the play engaging from first minute to last. She’s also elicited terrific performances from the ensemble which also includes Lucia Aremu, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, and Jordan Rice as the other students.
