Broadway's School Girls will stream its last week of performances

Set in a high school in Ghana in 1986, School Girls is mostly a comedy that becomes sneakily affecting as it goes on. Starring The Gilded Age‘s Denée Benton and Boop‘s Jasmine Amy Rogers, the play explores colorism and beauty standards through the lens of a local pageant; Patina Miller (a Tony winner for Pippin) and Heather Alicia Simms (who recently appeared in Purlie Victorious) also star. School Girls is running at the Friedman Theatre and produced by the not-for-profit Manhattan Theatre Club. The stream will also be made free to high schools from November 2 through 13. 

The Manhattan Theater Club previously partnered with LOLST to stream the play Jaja’s African Hair-Braiding. While recording production on stage and distributing them later has existed for a long time, livestreaming them still seems relatively nascent. But, as Alden Ehrenreich pointed out at the Tony’s earlier this year, making theater more accessible in this way has the potential to be a win-win for both audiences and artists. Audiences don’t have to be in New York, nor do they have to spend hundreds of dollars, to see a show, while the productions get an extra avenue for revenue in an increasingly harsh economic situation.