Editor’s Note: This story carries a personal connection for JSM Culture. Heather Alicia Simms and Editor in Chief Jahmela Smith are cousins.
Onstage as Headmistress Francis, Heather Alicia Simms brings warmth, authority and comic command to the center of Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play.
Heather Alicia Simms as Headmistress Francis in School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Photo by Matthew Murphy.
Now on Broadway as Headmistress Francis in Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, the Obie Award-winning actor enters a production alive with wit, tension and questions that stretch far beyond the walls of a Ghanaian boarding school. Performances began September 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with opening night set for September 28.
School Girls comes to Broadway with a history already written in applause. Nearly a decade after its 2017 New York premiere, Bioh’s comedy returns with its humor intact and its questions about beauty, power and belonging feeling no less urgent. Simms is part of the company carrying that legacy into a larger Broadway frame.
Beauty, belonging and the power behind the crown
At Aburi Girls Boarding School in 1986 Ghana, Paulina rules the social order with the confidence of a queen already fitted for her crown. Miss Ghana represents more than a pageant title. It promises visibility, status and the possibility of a different future. Then Ericka arrives from America, and the balance of power shifts.
Bioh lets the comedy sparkle before revealing the bruises underneath. Friendship and rivalry collide with colorism, beauty standards, class, belonging and the question of who is allowed to be seen as beautiful enough, polished enough or worthy enough. Whitney White directs the Broadway production, reuniting with Bioh after Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.
The company brings together Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton, Patina Miller, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, Jasmine Amy Rogers and Simms. As Headmistress Francis, Simms stands at the edge of the girls’ world and inside its consequences, an adult presence in a story where aspiration can harden into pressure and protection is never simple.
A career built across stages and screens
Simms arrives at Headmistress Francis with the kind of résumé that does not need embellishment. Her career moves through some of the most important spaces in American theater, from Broadway houses to downtown stages where new work first finds its pulse.
She was most recently seen on Broadway as Missy Judson in the Tony-nominated Purlie Victorious. Her stage credits also include Fairview, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Barbecue, Richard III, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and A Raisin in the Sun.
In 2019, Simms received an Obie Award for performance for Fabulation and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Her screen work spans The Equalizer, Swarm, Luke Cage, Broad City, Seven Seconds, Vampires vs. the Bronx and more, alongside an award-winning voiceover career.
Broadway can make a career look like a string of opening nights. Simms’s tells a fuller story. It has been built in rehearsal rooms, downtown theaters, regional houses, television sets and recording booths, through the less visible years when craft deepens long before the marquee catches up.
Before opening night, the room is already responding
Opening night is still ahead, but the first signs of connection are already visible inside the Friedman. In its first reported week of previews, School Girls drew 4,408 attendees out of 4,501 available seats, or 97.93 percent capacity, according to BroadwayWorld’s grosses data. Broadway Scorecard currently shows an A- audience grade across 99 audience reviews.
Across Broadway-focused social discussions, theatergoers have described the company as “absolutely phenomenal” and the play as “beautiful, fun, nuanced, nostalgic.” Another first-preview attendee reduced the experience to four words: “Laughed. Cried. Felt all the things.” Again and again, audiences are responding to the same alchemy: comedy that opens the door, harder truths that walk through it, and an all-Black-women ensemble allowed to be exuberant, cutting, vulnerable and complicated at once.
Formal reviews will follow after the September 28 opening. For now, the more immediate story is unfolding seat by seat: the audience is already leaning in.
A Broadway arrival years in the making
The original Off-Broadway production earned the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the Drama Desk Ensemble Award and the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award for playwright Jocelyn Bioh, alongside additional nominations. Broadway is not introducing School Girls so much as giving a proven work a new scale.
Its power rests in the freedom it gives Black girls and Black women to be everything at once: funny, vain, wounded, ambitious, jealous, glamorous, insecure, brilliant and difficult. The pageant provides the spectacle. Underneath it sits the more enduring contest over recognition, identity and the rules society writes onto beauty before a girl is old enough to question them.
Simms’s presence deepens that conversation. Her career has been built by inhabiting complicated women without sanding down their edges, and Headmistress Francis adds another figure to that lineage.
The family connection makes this moment personal. The public case is just as strong: her work has earned the spotlight.
On Broadway, in a play preoccupied with who gets seen and who gets chosen, Simms does not need to ask for the center of the frame. Years of work have already carried her there.
See Heather on Broadway
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is now in performances at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Tickets are available through the production’s official ticketing partner, Telecharge.
Follow Heather Alicia Simms on Instagram at @bkjamchild for more from her work on stage and screen.
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York City
Previews began: September 8, 2026
Opening night: September 28, 2026
Running time: approximately 80 minutes, no intermission
Reporting sources: Manhattan Theatre Club, Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, Broadway Scorecard, the Obie Awards and public Broadway preview discussions.
