Denée Benton and Patina Miller Help Give ‘School Girls’ a Broadway Glow-Up

Since this play premiered in 2017 Off Broadway, Bioh has joined the first rank of American comic playwrights. She has a particular gift for orchestrating a group for maximum ridiculousness. (It’s unsurprising that one of her projects was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s crowded farce, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” called “Merry Wives.”) In this, her breakout work, she more than demonstrates that exquisite technique, but she also does pique an appetite she doesn’t entirely fulfill. Basically, the play is too short — it rollicks along, pivots into gravitas, and then … ends.

The Broadway cast is extraordinary, but first among equals is Rogers, who honed her ability to seem desperate, charming and a little dangerous last spring in an Encores! production of “The Wild Party.” She is an incredible Ericka here, anxious and pugnacious by turns, yet her character leaves the stage strangely early, with certain seemingly necessary scenes unplayed. What does this American child think about Eloise’s admission of colorism? We never get a chance to hear. After spending only 85 delicious minutes with the mean girls, we were pushed out onto the sidewalk.

Still, 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.

For instance, both Benton and Rogers are Tony-nominated musical stars — Benton was nominated for “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and Rogers for “Boop!” — and, at one point, during a very goofy choral version of “The Greatest Love of All,” the two have a Battle of the Solos. Downtown, this scene was funny, but at the Friedman, the roof lifts off. The schoolgirls go full Whitney-and-Mariah-at-the-Oscars (in their 1999 quasi-showdown on “When You Believe”), their voices competing in escalating vocal runs. Just like Mariah, Rogers hits her high notes by pointing to them, reaching her arms dramatically to heaven. That seems right. Why should anything hold her down?

School Girls; or The African Mean Girls Play
Through Nov. 1 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.