Jocelyn Bioh’s “Mean Girls” at a Ghana Beauty Pageant
Like a nervous freshman passing test answers to a neighbor who’s shaking her down, the title of Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play” eagerly proffers its influences, before anyone thinks to ask. Teen-age hierarchies are on vibrant display, but they’re not the alpha and omega of this smart show. Set in 1986, at a girls’ boarding school in Ghana’s Aburi region, Bioh’s tart comedy plops us into a tightly calibrated clique. Paulina Sarpong, the queen bee, expects to sail through auditions for Miss Ghana and, from there, toward the even grander horizon of Miss Global Universe. Then a light-skinned new girl, Ericka, transfers in from the United States, bringing with her an enviable head of hair, foreign beauty products, firsthand knowledge of American pop culture, and the “more universal and commercial look” that the judges approve of. Her arrival stirs enough secrets, crushes, and shifting loyalties to fill an eight-episode TV show.
The play, which premièred Off Broadway in 2017 with an endlessly watchable cast, has the bright snap of a great teen comedy, full of stiletto-sharp insults and wobbling alliances among Paulina’s increasingly exasperated court. Yet Bioh is after more than teen-age warfare. As the pageant draws near, the girls’ rivalries reveal deep questions about colorism, beauty, and the strange, punishing standards by which young women learn to measure themselves. “School Girls” was partly inspired by a real-life controversy surrounding the 2011 Miss Universe Ghana pageant, when Yayra Erica Nego, an American-born, Minnesota-raised biracial woman of Ghanaian heritage, won the title over two prominent Ghanaian models. When the Manhattan Theatre Club brings the play to Broadway, starting previews Sept. 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—with an ensemble, directed by Whitney White, that includes Jasmine Amy Rogers, Lucia Aremu, Patina Miller, and Denée Benton—audiences can expect the pleasures promised by its mischievous title: competition, cattiness, and enough side-eye to power the national grid.—Rhoda Feng
About Town
For its twelfth season, Beach Sessions, an annual event that brings experimental dance to the Rockaways, moves from August to September. This year’s choreographer is Alexa West, a founder of Pageant, the East Williamsburg studio and collective that had a marathon showing at the Museum of Modern Art last month. West’s approach is seriously investigative, examining cultural phenomena and choreographic structure, but it leaves room for straight-faced wit, and her imagination is sensitive to setting. In “Amusement,” she responds to the Rockaway sand as both substance and stage. The beach is a scene.—Brian Seibert (Rockaway Beach at Beach 110th Street; Sept. 12.)
For twenty years, the musician Liz Harris has assumed many names in conjuring her various forms of atmospheric music, both solo and in collaboration, spanning ambient music, shoegaze, and experimental pop, but she has been most prodigious and prolific as Grouper. Some Grouper tracks are cosmic, with synths appearing like auroras along the firmament; others use wispy, haunted vocals and acoustic guitar like gentle brushstrokes on a boundless canvas. On Sept. 15, she is joined by Emily A. Sprague, the front person and guitarist for the indie-folk band Florist, whose solo work aligns nicely with Grouper’s, yet evokes a greater sense of whimsy.—Sheldon Pearce (Town Hall; Sept. 15-16.)
It’s a rarity to peek at a Broadway play through trembling fingers, but that’s what I did at “Paranormal Activity,” a legitimately spooky psychological thriller, loosely adapted from the hit horror-movie series of the same name. Travis A. Knight and Cher Álvarez are quietly effective as James and Lou, newlyweds who move to London, anxious to escape their troubles—ghosts? mental illness?—back in Chicago. Spoiler: hauntings travel. I’ve rarely seen a show with more effective lighting; my eyes kept wandering, in a panic, around the couple’s cleverly constructed two-story home, into rooms kept inky dark. But, though the special effects are killer, what makes the show click is its suspenseful melancholy, as quiet scenes build to jolts so intense that the whole audience screamed. A hoot, if you’ve got the spine for it.—Emily Nussbaum (August Wilson; through Jan. 3.)
“I am spent,” the title character of “The Real Ivanov,” Laura Strausfeld’s adaptation of Chekhov’s first completed play, repeatedly laments. Sensitively delivered by Sam Underwood, Ivanov’s refrain neatly conveys the thirty-five-year-old gentleman farmer’s psychological and financial state: debt-ridden depression. His doting wife (Ivory Aquino) wants to help, but her ministrations perturb him. So, too, do the antics of his estate manager (a buoyant Sam Adegoke), always concocting money-making schemes, and the wide-eyed adoration of the girl next door (Amelia Mason, deftly balancing naïveté with seductiveness), who wants to save him. Strausfeld’s direction is as nimble as her rendering of Chekhov’s dialogue, but her lightness of touch occasionally proves counterproductive; two scene-ending bangs—fireworks, a gun—make less of an impression than Ivanov’s whimpers.—Dan Stahl (Lynn F. Angelson; through Sept. 19.)
.jpg)
The boy-band-heartthrob-to-solo-superstar pipeline is a familiar one in the pop pantheon, but few have worn it as well as the British singer Harry Styles. He has used his time in the quintet One Direction as a catapult toward a more ambitious kind of commercial expression, guided by a curated sensibility. The 2019 album “Fine Line” honed his omnidirectional pop rock, whereas the 2022 album “Harry’s House” embraced a glossy, ecstatic synth pop. For his most recent record, “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” Styles embarks on a thirty-show residency at the Garden, supported by the producer and d.j. Jamie xx, who has blossomed from the craftsman of the English indie-pop band the xx to an entertainer in his own right.—S.P. (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 9, Sept. 11-12, and select dates through Oct. 31.)
Joe Swanberg’s first feature in six years, “The Sun Never Sets,” a bittersweet drama of romantic uncertainty, finds this probingly attentive filmmaker in an impulsive mood. Dakota Fanning stars as Wendy, a construction worker in Anchorage, Alaska, whose relationship with Jack (Jake Johnson), a money manager and the divorced father of two young children, hits an odd obstacle. Jack, certain that he wants neither to remarry nor to have more children, frets that Wendy will resent his refusals, and he insists that they take a six-month break for her to weigh her choices. The resulting complications and coincidences, involving old and new partners, are brought to life in floridly expressive performances, yet the characters are kept at a distance, in spite of being filmed up close, as the story rushes to its philosophical, hauntingly ironic conclusion.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
On and Off the Avenue
Rachel Syme on nostalgia in new perfumes.
We are living through very strange times, trendwise. Nostalgia is in, but not for any one decade in particular; it’s more a hodgepodge of twentieth-century fads all heaped on top of one another, creating a messy smashburger of historical reference. Y2K-era pieces, such as baguette bags, cargo pants, pageboy hats, and low-slung jeans, are popping up again, but so are nineties-esque baby-doll dresses and wraparound sunglasses, eighties-adjacent neon windbreakers, and ostrich-feather festooned jackets straight out of the Jazz Age. We are living, as the critic George W. S. Trow once wrote, within “the context of no-context,” where everything we consume is so mediated and remixed that it has been flattened into a vague pancake of yearning for a bygone time. Few consumers know why they want to wear ballet flats again, or even the origins of ballet flats in the first place; they just know that they were, at one time, all the rage, and they are now all the rage again—at least, until the next thing comes along. It makes sense, then, that retromania has also stormed the world of fragrance.
Many of the perfumes launching this season are either direct remakes of once popular scents, or sentimental callbacks to a romanticized past. In late summer, Gap launched a new suite of perfumes modelled off the brand’s beloved fragrances of the nineteen-nineties—Grass, Heaven, Dream, and Om—in no small part to appeal to wistful elder millennials who miss spritzing themselves at the mall. The brand worked with the veteran perfumers Honorine Blanc and Nicole Mancini to create reimagined versions of the four original Gap scents (along with one freshly minted scent, called Harmony, with notes of bergamot, mandarin, and musk), updated for modern noses. I tried out a sample kit ($20) and, alas, did not get the fragrant déjà-vu hit I’d been hoping for. The original Grass—my signature scent in ninth grade—was funky and vegetal, almost mulch-like. The new Grass ($52) is certainly softer, with the addition of linden and violet, but something is lost in translation.
I was far more charmed by the offerings from El Morocco, a new line of perfumes out of California that are meant to channel the louche glamour of the long-shuttered El Morocco night club, a midtown-Manhattan gathering place for café society between the nineteen-thirties and the seventies. Long gone are the days of speakeasy Martinis in zebra-striped banquettes, but the fragrances, nostalgia plays though they may be, do not smell at all sepia-toned. The brand’s first offering is Travel Discovery Set ($135), featuring five scents enclosed in a sleek silver cigarette case, which feels substantial and heavy in the hand, like something your grandmother might have owned. It is an objet flung out of context, to be sure, but then, these days, what isn’t?
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: