Table Of Content
- Playwright Jocelyn Bioh to Be Recognized by the Dramatists Guild for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
- cornrow styles
- Inside The Playbill
- The Manhattan Theatre Club Brings Jocelyn Bioh to Broadway for the 2023-2024 Season
- The Broadway Review: With ‘The Great Gatsby,’ a production that’s more pyrite than treasure

Emlyn Travis is a news writer at Entertainment Weekly with over five years of experience covering the latest in entertainment. A proud Kingston University alum, Emlyn has written about music, fandom, film, television, and awards for multiple outlets including MTV News, Teen Vogue, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Paper Magazine, Dazed, and NME. I wish I had one of those practices that other writers I admire have, where maybe they wake up at 8am, and they make a tea, and they write their inspirations down, they watch the sunrise or something like that. I kind of throw together a bowl of cereal, I sit down, and I’m like, ‘Let’s see what comes out today,’ and if that’s one page or 50, that’s what it is until the next time I sit down to write.
Playwright Jocelyn Bioh to Be Recognized by the Dramatists Guild for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
She starred in Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams at MCC Theater, Tracy Letts’ Man From Nebraska at Second Stage Theatre (Lucille Lortel Nomination, Outer Critics Circle Nomination), as well as Clare Barron’s hit Obie Award-winning play, I’ll Never Love Again. Nana is currently shooting the second season of Netflix’s hit show “The Diplomat”, reprising her role as Billie Appiah. Born in Senegal, Marie has called Harlem home for nearly a decade and a half. However, a lack of immigration papers and the expensive requirements of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program have stalled her plans for university. After a quick rundown of her chaotic morning, Marie opens the shop. The sweet-hearted braider Miriam (Brittany Adebumola), who dreams of bringing her young daughter to America from Sierra Leone, follows on Marie’s heels.
cornrow styles
Somi Kakoma is the daughter of immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda. Known in the jazz world simply as Somi, her nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album made her the first African woman ever nominated in any of the Grammy’s jazz categories. A recipient of two NAACP Image Awards for Best Vocal Jazz Album, the Doris Duke Artist Award, and the inaugural Jazz Music Award for Best Vocal Performance, Somi is also a Soros Equality Fellow and United States Artist Fellow. Last season, she wrote and starred in the Off-Broadway production of Dreaming Zenzile - an original musical based on the life of Miriam Makeba. Somi's performance was nominated for Drama League, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and AUDELCO Awards.
Inside The Playbill
Tickets are $30 (including all fees), payable by cash or credit card, and are available to students with an ID from a degree or diploma granting institution. Tickets are subject to availability and are limited to two per valid ID. Note that anyone aged 35 or under may prefer to purchase their tickets through the 30 Under 35 program instead. Student tickets are available at the box office on the day of the show when the box office opens. Note that students aged 35 or under may prefer to purchase their tickets through the 30 Under 35 program instead – see above. Stitch braids are a type of protective style that is made using the feed-in technique that is, you continue to add more extension to your natural hair as you braid.
NOMINATED FOR TWO OUTER CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS
The run of this play is well timed in New York, where our local politics have suddenly become consumed with the question of whether or not it’s right to welcome migrants when—for whatever reason, by whichever means—they show up in the city. Onye is a Nigerian-born actor, producer, musician and educator. Recent credits include guest star and recurring appearances in “Bob Hearts Abishola” (CBS), “Will Trent” (ABC), “Random Acts of Flyness” (HBO) and “Outer Banks” (Netflix). Additionally, he teaches at the Robert Mello Studio in Atlanta, GA, as well as the Terry Knickerbocker Studio in Brooklyn, NY. Onye also holds an MA in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Georgia. We understand the importance of maintaining healthy hair.
The Manhattan Theatre Club Brings Jocelyn Bioh to Broadway for the 2023-2024 Season
We invite as many of them as we can to have a celebration for them during the awards season. Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis.
Broadway show ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ tells story of immigrant women - NBC News
Broadway show ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ tells story of immigrant women.
Posted: Mon, 23 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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It’s really a love letter to all those African hair braiding ladies. Bioh’s previous play, “Nollywood Dreams,” was about the movie industry in Nigeria—and, in a hilarious side plot, how it’s digested on daytime TV. Here, in Jaja’s shop, we see how the cultural products forged so harrowingly in “Nollywood” are transmitted across oceans and throughout diasporas, salving homesickness as they go. At one point, Ndidi acts out a long passage of dialogue from a show that’s playing on the shop’s small TV, a glowing locus of constant attention. Jaja (Somi Kakoma), the title character of Jocelyn Bioh’s new play, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” doesn’t show up onstage until the show’s nearly over.
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She’s described by her employees in the course of a long day in 2019 at the Harlem shop over which she lovingly lords. To Bea (Zenzi Williams) and Aminata (Nana Mensah), she’s a demanding boss with a proud streak. They take turns affectionately mocking how she says her fiancé Steven’s name—a bit froggy in the throat, the “v” tending toward an “f,” both vowel sounds braggadociously distended. Jaja and Steven are getting married on this day; he’s a well-off-sounding white man, and she’s an undocumented immigrant from Senegal.
The Broadway Review: With ‘The Great Gatsby,’ a production that’s more pyrite than treasure
Still, a train of customers come and go, each in pursuit of a selected hairstyle. She recently wrapped the limited series “Presumed Innocent”, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal (Apple TV+). Queen of Glory, her debut feature which she wrote, directed and starred in, premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival where she won the Best New Narrative Director award and earned a 2022 Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. Recent credits include Netflix’s “The Chair” opposite Sandra Oh, Ekwa Msangi’s Farewell Amor (IFC), Judd Apatow’s King of Staten Island, and the A24 film After Yang starring Colin Farrell.
The television screen propped near the ceiling displays Afrobeats music videos or a Nollywood movie more enticing than anything seen in the theaters recently. Carts full of combs, braiding gel and oil sheen sliding over the floor feel familiar to any Black woman who has spent a good portion of her life in those worn leather chairs. Still, the play moves beyond the intricate hairstyles—though many are displayed here (the hair and wig design is by Nikiya Mathis)—to highlight the women at the heart of these shops. These are women boasting bold laughs and heavy hearts, who twist and manipulate hair until their fingers swell from the effort. Set on a sweltering summer day in 2019, Marie (Dominique Thorne) arrives late to open her mother's shop to discover that sunny hair braider Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) is already waiting outside.

To make stitch braids, you have to section the natural hair into thick or thin horizontal lines and then braid the natural hair with the hair extension. Notably, Here We Are, the final Sondheim musical that posthumously premiered last year Off-Broadway at The Shed, was not considered for this year's awards at the request of the production. The playwright Jocelyn Bioh, whose Jaja’s African Hair Braiding opened on Broadway in 2023, is to be honored by the Dramatists Guild at their annual ceremony on May 6 at Sony Hall. Bioh is the recipient of the Hull-Warriner Award, presented annually to an author in recognition of a play that deals with controversial subjects involving the fields of political, religious or social mores of the times.
"Live streaming theater begins to bridge the gap between traditional theater audiences and those who have not typically been part of the Broadway experience," Augustine said in a press release. "This includes those who have never been to a Broadway show and those who have never even considered it, individuals in correctional facilities, classrooms, underserved communities, and every individual impacted by the challenges of in-person theater." MTC's extended world premiere of Jaja's will live stream its final week of performances from Nov. 14 through 19 worldwide from Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. The new play opened on Broadway on Oct. 3 and has received rave reviews — and two extensions. It was originally set to close on Oct. 29, then was previously extended to Nov. 5.