Latest news with #Jaja'sAfricanHairBraiding
Los Angeles Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Center Theatre Group's 2025-26 season: David Byrne's 'Here Lies Love,' 'Paranormal Activity' and more
Bisserat Tseggai, left, and Mia Ellis in 'JaJa's African Hair Braiding.' The Imelda Marcos bio-musical 'Here Lies Love' injects some disco shimmer to the Center Theatre Group 2025-26 season announced Tuesday. The company behind the Ahmanson Theatre and Mark Taper Forum in downtown L.A. and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City released a lineup that also includes the Jocelyn Bioh play 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding'; Eboni Booth's new play 'Primary Trust'; a stage riff on the 'Paranormal Activity' movies; the musical '& Juliet' and a 25th anniversary revival of 'Mamma Mia!' 'Here Lies Love,' featuring music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, and lyrics by Byrne, made history as Broadway's first musical with an all-Filipino cast. The production earned 2024 Tony nominations for score, sound design, scene design and choreography as well as praise from critics including the New York Times' Jesse Green, who applauded the 'infernally catchy songs.' The musical also faced criticism for historical distortion and what some saw as the underplaying of corruption, censorship and violent political oppression in the Philippines during the Marcos regime. The musical has been updated since its 2013 Off-Broadway premiere at the Public Theater to emphasize the People Power Revolution that spurred the end of the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos era. In New York, producers transformed the Broadway Theater to evoke Studio 54. Center Theatre Group will present 'Here Lies Love' in the Taper in a run scheduled to open Feb. 11. Snehal Desai, CTG's artistic director, will helm the production. The comedy 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' earned Tony nominations last year for best play, direction, scenic design and sound design, and Dede Ayite won the award for her costumes. Set in Harlem, Bioh's play centers on a community of West African immigrants who 'confront the challenges of being outsiders in their own neighborhood.' Whitney White will direct a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. It opens at the Taper on Oct. 1. Booth's 'Primary Trust' was the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama. The Pulitzer citation called it 'a simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person's life and enrich an entire community.' Caleb Eberhardt in La Jolla Playhouse's West Coast-premiere production of 'Primary Trust' last year. After seeing the play's West Coast premiere at La Jolla Playhouse last year, Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote: 'This is a quirky, small-scale, quietly reflective work that's as tenderhearted as it is spryly comic and as poignant as it is ultimately uplifting. 'It's refreshing to see such a prodigious honor bestowed on a piece of writing that's content to go about its human business without the need to inflate its own importance.' Knud Adams will direct the Taper production, which opens in May 2026. Here are the six major productions in the 2025-26 CTG schedule (in chronological order) announced by Desai, managing director and chief executive Meghan Pressman and producing director Douglas C. Baker. A seventh production will be announced at a later date. '& Juliet'Book by David West ReadMusic by Max Martin & FriendsDirected By Luke SheppardAhmanson Theatre Aug. 13-Sept. 7 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding'Mark Taper Forum Oct. 1-Nov. 9 'Paranormal Activity'Based on the 'Paranormal Activity' films from Blumhouse and Solana Films, adapted here by arrangement with Paramount Pictures and Melting PotWritten by Levi HollowayDirected by Felix BarrettCo-production with American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C. Ahmanson Theatre Nov. 13-Dec. 7 'Here Lies Love'Mark Taper Forum Feb. 11-March 22 'Primary Trust'Mark Taper Forum May 20-June 28, 2026 'Mamma Mia!'Music and lyrics by Benny Andersson & Björn UlvaeusBook by Catherine JohnsonDirected by Phyllida LloydAhmanson Theatre June 23-July 19, 2026 The company's 'CTG:FWD' programming includes three shows at the Kirk Douglas: 'Puppet Up! — Uncensored,' an audience-driven affair featuring creations from the Jim Henson Co., running July 16-27; 'Guac,' writer and star Manuel Oliver's one-man show, from the father of a son who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., running Oct. 14-Nov. 2; and 'The Enormous Crocodile,' a musical based on the work of Roald Dahl, Dec. 5-Jan. 4. 'Like It Like Harlem,' a production in partnership with Muse/ique, is scheduled for Aug. 8-10 at the Taper.
Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In ‘Jaja's African Hair Braiding,' a day at the salon can be funny, invigorating, and a snapshot of immigrant life
As the child of parents from Ghana, she also understands the immigrant experience intimately. 'My parents and a lot of the people who I'm representing in this play had the dream of coming to America and wanting a better life for themselves. But then the characters are also facing the reality of what it's like to be an immigrant in America right now.' Indeed, when 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' premiered on Broadway in fall of 2023 to warm reviews and five Tony Award nominations, it felt resonant and timely. Now, with Director Summer L. Williams at rehearsal. Taylor Rossi Photography 'We are watching people be left behind, abducted, and disappeared,' says Summer L. Williams, who's directing 'Jaja's' for SpeakEasy, alluding to the current administration's aim of 'mass deportation' and increased ICE raids without due process. 'It's totally changed how I've approached my thinking around the play and what I want it to do. The objective is still the same, but the intensity is shifted within me.' Advertisement A follow-up to Bioh's 'Marie and Jaja have the same kind of conflict that any 18-year-old daughter has with their mother,' Bioh says. 'They want to live their own life and they feel either burdened by or trapped by their parent. There's always this kind of push-pull of who knows best.' To write the two characters, she tapped into her dynamic with her own mother. 'I always felt like I knew better than she did and questioned a lot of her choices,' says Bioh, who's also worked as an actress both on and off Broadway. Advertisement Among the other hair braiders are Bea (Crystin Gilmore), a gossipy Ghanaian queen bee in her 40s who is always stirring the pot, and Bea's friend Aminata (Kwezi Shongwe), a Senegalese woman who's fed up with her turbulent marriage and wayward husband. Miriam (Marahadoo Effeh), a quiet recent immigrant from Sierra Leone who's hoping to bring over her young son, unfurls a dramatic story about leaving her lazy husband after she had a passionate affair. And Ndidi (Catia), a young firecracker from Nigeria, is the fastest and most in-demand hair braider, which raises Bea's ire. Along for the ride are a vibrant array of clients and several men who pop into the store to hawk their wares. Bioh's plays are known for toggling seamlessly between uproarious, gasp-inducing comedy, ebullient joy, and an undercurrent of pain, frustration, and pathos. The bellyaching humor, Bioh says, derives from the familiar human behavior that's unfolding onstage. 'We're laughing at the recognition of truth that we've all experienced, and sometimes that recognition is funny, sometimes it's heartbreaking, sometimes it's devastating or sad. That's always my center of gravity as a writer — to make sure that I'm always leaning into the truth, because that's where the comedy lives.' As the audience enters the world of Jaja's African Hair Braiding Shop on a hot summer morning in Harlem, Williams says she hopes 'to create a space where it feels like the rest of the world falls away. You're fully present and consumed by what's happening in the world of that shop.' With braiders fashioning the various hairstyles — from jumbo box braids and long micro braids to cornrows and an eye-popping Beyoncé-inspired look — the audience glimpses these hair maestros hard at work, and the cast has been doing regular tutorials to learn the craft themselves. '[The braiders] 'do something incredible for another woman, and it's magical,' Williams says. The customers, she adds, become 'fully transformed, get up out of the chair, and leave different, new, refreshed, excited.' Advertisement In crafting her play, Bioh wanted to highlight the diversity of stories within immigrant communities and to push back against the xenophobic narratives and negative stereotypes about immigrants fostered by certain politicians and media. 'I was just trying to humanize the people behind the policy, to humanize the immigrant story,' Bioh says. 'So that people who come to see the play, who maybe have their own implicit biases, could leave having even just the tiniest little blade of grass version of empathy for their stories and their community.' Williams says that she's opening the production with what she calls a 'grand gesture' and teases the possibility of an 'even grander gesture at the end of the show that could be absolutely devastating.' 'Do we need that devastation to make sure that this is firmly cemented in everyone's hearts and minds, so that they have to go and do something to prevent what's happening?' she says. The play's ending will leave audiences with 'basically a choice between feeling joy or pain, and the way those choices manifest, it's either hopeful or it's truthful,' Williams says. To survive this fraught era, Bioh says that community and solidarity are key, something she discovered when her older brother passed away unexpectedly a few weeks before rehearsals started for 'Jaja's' on Broadway. 'I was still very deep in grief dealing with the loss of my brother, and the way my community and everybody really jumped in to circle around and be there for me was powerful,' Bioh says. Advertisement 'At the end of the day, these women are like a chosen family. Many of them have found themselves in a new place that they're trying to make home. So regardless of whatever happened during the day, all of the nonsense, any fights and ill feelings, all of that goes out of the door when a member of this sisterhood, this community needs help — when you know you need to step up and be in service to someone in this family.' JAJA'S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING By Jocelyn Bioh, presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts, May 2-31. Tickets from $25. 617-933-8600,
