Almost a decade after we first met the students at the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Jocelyn Bioh’s breakthrough comedy, Paulina, now portrayed by Denée Benton, is as mean as ever, the meanest girl in this school in central Ghana in 1986. But she is also the most popular – until, that is, her classmates meet the new transfer student Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers). Without even trying, Ericka thwarts Paulina’s campaign to win the audition to compete for Miss Ghana of 1986. The beauty pageant recruiter Eloise (Patina Miller) sees something in Ericka that she doesn’t see in Paulina – lighter skin.

For all the tensions between some of the characters, there is a palpable underlying feeling of camaraderie among the eight performers in this new production of “School Girls, or the African Mean Girls Play,” opening tonight at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Everybody involved  deserves to feel pride that a show written, directed, designed and performed by Black women has made it to the “Great White Way.”   The Broadway version has a longer running time, a more elaborate set and extravagant costume design, and a starrier cast than the original Off-Broadway production. But it also somehow feels slighter than it did when I saw it in 2017. I don’t think this has anything to do with it being swallowed up in a Broadway house more than twice the size of the original venue.  It is more likely because Jocelyn Bioh has in the decade since written such acclaimed plays as “ “Merry Wives”,’ the prize-winning adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy that reopened the Delacorte in 2021, and especially“Jaja’s African Hair Salon,” the 2024 Tony-nominated play that brought us into the swirling world of struggling West African immigrants in Harlem. “Jaja” is also a comedy, but with more complexity and higher stakes, setting up expectations that this earlier play doesn’t quite meet.

This is not to deny an edge to the play, which was inspired by the true story of pageant officials in Ghana choosing for their 2011 Miss Ghana a young woman who was biracial and born in America, in hopes that a West African nation would finally have a chance at the Miss Universe crown. There are layers here of racial self-loathing and what’s known as colorism, that Bioh, a first generation Ghanian-American, does attempt to explore, setting the story in the elite boarding school that her mother attended.

We eventually realize that the ambivalence and self-loathing is embodied in Paulina. Denee Benton, who is probably best-known now as Peggy Scott in HBO’s The Gilded Age, but has deep Broadway cred (including a Tony nomination for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) , is impressively transformed into the bossy and belittling queen bee, covering up her insecurity with lavish self-centeredness. But at one point, she boasts of her relatives in America working at a “high class restaurant”: White Castle.  If this is not quite as mean-spirited toward Paulina as Paulina is to everybody else, it’s one of numerous examples in the play of the sacrifice of subtlety for the sake of a laugh.

Jasmine Amy Rogers, who gained every theater lover’s rapt attention with her splashy Broadway debut in the title role of “Boop,” is spot-on as Paulina’s foil, who does everything effortlessly better, including hilariously her thunder in a school song , belting it to hell – which seems tailor-made for Rogers’ spectacular voice, but was in fact also in the original

Patina Miller is suitably haughty and not-so-secretly bigoted, as Eloise, the pageant beauty recruiter who reminds everybody repeatedly that she was Miss Ghana of 1966. She is an alumna of the school, and has a rivalry  (similar to the one between Paulina and Ericka) with her former classmate, Headmistress Francis (Heather Alicia Simms.)

These four are the Broadway pros. The other half of the cast are all making their Broadway debuts, and they collectively add tangibly to the sense of place, with a particular stand-out performance byErin Morton as Nana (who also stood out as the poor, sweet Martha Dunnstock in the current production of Heathers the Musical)

The song that they all sing as an audition for Eloise is one of Whitney Houston’s signature songs, “Greatest Love of All.”:
I believe the children are our future…Show them all the beauty they possess inside

Shortly afterward, the situation explodes — Paulina attacks, Ericka counter-attacks, the headmistress scolds, the recruiter retreats, chaos reigns, somebody bleeds, truths out, ironies emerge, the two luckiest girls in the school turn out not to be so lucky at all. And Bioh’s point is driven home: Whitney notwithstanding, the culture is not interested in showing children the beauty they possess inside; the push to conform to outward standards of beauty can easily take away a young woman’s dignity. 

School Girls, or the African Mean Girls Play
MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater through November 1, 2026
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $84 – $321
Written by Jocelyn Bioh
Directed by Whitney White
Scenic Design by Teresa L. Williams; Costume Design by Qween Jean; Lighting Design by Stacey Derosier; Sound Design by Cody Spencer; Hair and Wig Design by Nikiya Mathis; Make-Up Design by Nikiya Mathis
Cast: Lucia Aremu as Ama, Denée Benton as Paulina, Patina Miller as Eloise, Erin Morton as Nana, Nia Otchere-Sarfo as Gifty, Jordan Rice as Mercy, Jasmine Amy Rogers as Ericka, and Heather Alicia Simms as Headmistress Francis
Photographs by Matthew Murphy