School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play
Opening Night: September 28, 2026
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Website: www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Becoming Miss Ghana 1986 would mean fame, fortune, and prosperity. At least, that’s what Paulina—the queen bee of Aburi Girls Boarding School—believes. When the pageant recruiter comes to school, Paulina and her crew pull out all the stops. But to their surprise, a new transfer student from America kicks the competition into a higher, far more personal gear.
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September 28, 2026
What we do have is marvelous. And Broadway does give the play an appropriate magnitude — the vast room matches Paulina’s operatic behavior. The scale of the actors, too, allows White to create exaggerations and grand gestures where the original production (directed by Rebecca Taichman) preferred a smaller, subtler, close-up magic.
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September 28, 2026
Ericka’s arrival sets off a chaotic chain of events by turns uproariously funny, stingingly painful and, for anyone who lived through teenage bullying, cruelly familiar. Yet Bioh always keeps her tone two or three notches above naturalism, allowing the audience guilt-free enjoyment in reliving all these excruciating memories. It’s a tricky balance, one that White negotiates expertly for this high-energy Broadway revival.
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September 28, 2026
Benton and Rogers—each a radiant presence with resting Disney Princess Face—are perfectly matched rivals. As Paulina, Benton is unflinchingly cruel. She even draws gasps for her especially barbed comments toward Nana (Morton, hilarious and heartbreaking), her most amenable sidekick who’s grateful for the warmth of Paulina’s ambient light.
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September 28, 2026
“School Girls” is an uproariously funny and heartbreaking portrait of sisterhood framed by the consequences of colonialism, anti-Blackness, and colorism. In just 75 minutes, “School Girls” captures what it means to be Black and female across time, space and place.
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September 28, 2026
When it premiered at MCC in 2017 it was fresh, savvy, and funny. Almost a decade later in its Broadway debut, it’s lost none of that, and White’s production — perhaps inevitably given the arc of those passing years — adds sharpness to its cruelties and weight to its grief.
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September 28, 2026
Bioh, perfectly assisted by her sympatico director Whitney White and a no-weak-link cast, has done something quite amazing with this comedy-drama, opening tonight on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a first-rate Manhattan Theatre Club production. Bioh takes on the tropes and dramatic conventions of high school claustrophobia, its rebellions and savageries and tendernesses so familiar from ancestors like the franchise that gives this play its subtitle and right up through the newcomer that called John Proctor a villain, that we can only trust a writer of her depth and skills (she wrote Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, after all) to find a new path through the well-trod turf.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
What began as a plucky battle between a friendly newcomer and a queen bee with a nasty stinger morphs into something much more complicated, especially as further revelations are uncovered. But while School Girls shifts into another gear by fearlessly tackling African ideals of beauty with words and deeds that had the audience gasping at points, it also remains very, very funny.
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September 28, 2026
It’s a pleasure to be reunited with flawed, fractious but ultimately endearing classmates of this crowd-pleasing play.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
This is a production expert at making one smile. For what is clearly one of the past decade’s most loved plays, this Broadway debut is a beautiful homecoming.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
Is School Girls, the play, better now than it was originally? No. But multiple elements of the production join to heighten the play’s effect. If School Girls is as much of a treat as before, watching Rogers and Benton battle it out—in snark, song, and eventual fisticuffs—under the fine hand of director White makes it even more so.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
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.
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September 28, 2026
The cat fights that ensue among these characters go far beyond anything that takes place in Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women.” Unfortunately, these nasty encounters in “School Girls” are also far less witty. At times, Bioh’s comedy isn’t just about teenagers; it appears to have been written by teenagers.
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School Girls is at its most fun when all the girls are trading Bioh’s snappy dialogue back and forth like an expert game of pattycake. In scenes like these, there’s a frenetic yet coordinated energy to White’s direction that feels like a celebration of pure, unadulterated girlhood. Together, the cast is an ensemble of consummate comedians with impeccable timing. But the slower, lower-energy scenes hit just as hard. Love and pride for Ghana is something all the characters feel deeply. But it’s how to represent Ghana on the world stage — or rather, whose skin color is best to do so — that leads to the ultimate heartbreak of this story.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
As directed by Whitney White, School Girls sprays a thin mist of social commentary over its familiar genre-based story. But where the production shines is in the comedic set pieces, including a hilariously off-kilter rendition of a Whitney Houston ballad that allows each of the schoolgirls a moment to shine.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2026
Sometimes you need to see two different productions of a show to understand the value of a truly inspiring stage director who can take a narratively predictable script and turn it into a total blast. Such was the case for me with “School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play,” a cumbersomely titled moral comedy from Jocelyn Bioh that the director Whitney White has transformed into a profoundly optimistic Broadway celebration of girlhood. The show now possesses a spirit so exuberant as to enthrall for its joyous 80 minutes of running time.
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