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    ‘Macbeth in Stride’ Review: A Leap and Stumble Into a Classic

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    One of the most performed and reimagined works of English literature becomes a fourth-wall-breaking musical revue.“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring

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      An actor, musician and writer, White is also now an in-demand stage director. “I am looking, I am hungry, I am searching,” she said.This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama “Liberation” Off Broadway, then the two-hander “The Last Five Years” on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing “Macbeth in Stride,” her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.During the song “Reach for It,” White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. “Power’s not supposed to look like me,” she sang into a microphone.Maybe it should.A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series “I’m a Virgo”) and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said.White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.“There’s nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,” she said.With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of “Macbeth in Stride” in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris.Elias Williams for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Liberation,’ the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

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      Bess Wohl’s moving new play, about a group of women in 1970s Ohio, explores the power of sisterhood and the limits of motherhood.How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?That’s one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in “Liberation,” her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play’s warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: “It’s almost impossible to have both.”At any rate, it hasn’t been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys’ teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats “are the same thing,” she says.) Denying that she is the group’s leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone’s contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Urinetown’ and Other Plays and Musicals to See in February

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      Also onstage in February: Calista Flockhart in a Sam Shepard revival, boldface names in Joy Behar’s “My First Ex-Husband” and a marionette made of ice.Let some brilliant theater artists — like Jeff Hiller in “Urinetown,” Susannah Flood in “Liberation” and Tonya Pinkins in “My First Ex-Husband” — tell you a story this month. Here are 10 shows to tempt you, Off Broadway and beyond.‘Urinetown’If you are allergic to bathroom humor, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Tony Award-winning musical satire probably is not for you. Winkingly Brechtian, with echoes of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” it’s set in a dystopia where private toilets are illegal and public facilities charge for use — a situation ripe for rebellion. Directed by Teddy Bergman (“KPOP”) for New York City Center Encores!, this brief revival stars Jordan Fisher, Rainn Wilson, Keala Settle and Jeff Hiller. (Through Feb. 16, New York City Center)‘Anywhere’Ashwaty Chennatt as Antigone with a melting Oedipus in Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Anywhere” at Here.Richard TermineA marionette made of ice plays a wandering, melting, disappearing Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone in this puppet piece by the French company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, which uses bits of text from Henry Bauchau’s novel “Oedipus on the Road.” Conceived and directed by Élise Vigneron, whose interest in ephemerality has led her to work repeatedly with ice puppets, it is presented with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as part of Basil Twist’s Dream Music Puppetry program. Recommended for ages 11 and up. (Through March 2, Here)‘My Man Kono’The New York Times once described Charlie Chaplin’s longtime assistant, Toraichi Kono, as “the keeper of his privacy.” An immigrant from Japan who made fleeting appearances in Chaplin films, this “combination valet, bodyguard and chauffeur” is the title character of Philip W. Chung’s historically based play, which follows Kono’s fortunes as he is suspected of espionage and imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for Pan Asian Repertory Theater. (Through March 9, A.R.T./New York Theaters)‘Grangeville’This new two-hander by the Obie Award winner Samuel D. Hunter (“A Case for the Existence of God”) stars Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks as estranged brothers with different fathers, discrete wounds and far-flung lives — one in their Idaho hometown, the other in a city thousands of miles away. But they have a shared filial task: caring for their sick mother. Jack Serio (“Uncle Vanya”) directs for Signature Theater. (Through March 16, Signature Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul Mescal Rides ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to Brooklyn

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      The award-winning production will begin performances in February as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s next season.Brooklyn Academy of Music next spring will present an Olivier Award-winning revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” starring Paul Mescal, the Irish actor, in the role made famous by Marlon Brando.The production is the high point of the next season at BAM, which, like many nonprofit arts organizations, has been struggling to rebuild after a period of economic challenges and leadership change.“Streetcar,” one of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, imagines a down-on-her-luck Southern woman’s disruptive visit to the New Orleans home of her sister and brother-in-law. It was first staged on Broadway in 1947, and this latest revival began at London’s Almeida Theater in 2022, and then transferred to the West End in 2023. Not only did the production win an Olivier, but so did Mescal and Anjana Vasan for their portrayals of Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Vasan will join Mescal in Brooklyn, as will Patsy Ferran, reprising her London performance as Blanche DuBois.The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the London production “an electrifying ensemble production.”Mescal, an Oscar nominee for “Aftersun,” is also known for the series “Normal People” and the film “All of Us Strangers,” but he is likely to become much better known this month because he is starring in “Gladiator II.” “Streetcar” is his American theater debut.The production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, will return to the West End from Feb. 3 to 22 at the Noël Coward Theater before transferring to BAM where it is scheduled to run from Feb. 28 to April 6. The producers of the West End production, led by ATG Entertainment, a large British theater company with a growing presence in New York, are credited as presenting partners at BAM.Among the other highlights of the BAM season is a production of “The Threepenny Opera” performed by the Berliner Ensemble under the direction of Barrie Kosky. Joshua Barone, reviewing the production in Berlin for The New York Times, called it “hauntingly enjoyable.”BAM will also present “Macbeth in Stride,” Whitney White’s reimagining of Lady Macbeth “as an indomitable Black female icon.” The production was at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company last year; in The Washington Post, Celia Wren called it “an ingenious meditation on ambition and the Bard.”Both of those shows will be in April; the opera is being presented with St. Ann’s Warehouse, and the play is a co-production with Shakespeare Theater Company and Philadelphia Theater Company, both of which staged it last fall, and Yale Repertory Theater, which is staging it next month.There will also be dance (including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Batsheva Dance Company and the annual DanceAfrica event), music (including Max Richter), films and children’s programming. More

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      ‘Walden’ Review: My Sister! My Twin! My Astronaut!

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      Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters star in a new Off Broadway play that’s a climate disaster drama cohabiting with a domestic soap opera.Despite its name and original mission, Second Stage Theater, founded in 1979, has in recent years expanded its reach to include many new works by early-career playwrights.The latest beneficiary of that expansion is Amy Berryman, who makes her professional New York debut with “Walden,” the promising but unconvincing story of twin astronaut sisters on opposite sides of a philosophical divide in a devastating climate dystopia. It opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Off Broadway space, the Tony Kiser Theater in Midtown Manhattan.The promising part of the play is the new angle it offers on an old sci-fi setup. In Berryman’s vision of the near future, Earth has reached what the sisters call P.O.N.R., for “point of no return.” NASA, having (like Second Stage) expanded its original mission, decides to accelerate plans to build habitations on Mars. But unlike movies with a similar premise, the prime movers here are women.That makes for fresh takes on the usual questions of home and hearth and the fate of humanity. It’s nice to see that, at least at first, Cassie (Zoë Winters) is a gung-ho adventurer. Having just returned from a year on the moon, where she became the first person to “grow something from nothing” on its inhospitable surface, she has now been asked to lead an epochal mission to Mars.Not that Earth’s surface is much more hospitable, with violent weather and rising tides killing millions and causing wars. In response, Cassie’s skittish sister, Stella, has retreated to the American interior to nest in a corrugated but strangely chic wilderness cabin. Stella (Emmy Rossum) is also an astronaut — or was. Though she left NASA under mysterious circumstances, her design for a new habitation called Walden will be the one used on Mars. Cassie will likely live there for the rest of her life.On the weekend before she begins training for that future, Cassie visits Stella after a long estrangement. Inevitably, a debate breaks out between them about whether to prioritize saving the planet (as Stella favors) or preparing an escape route (as Cassie does). Encouraging Stella’s view is her boyfriend, Bryan (Motell Foster), a so-called Earth Advocate for whom expanding the reach of human depravity to virgin new worlds is a poor excuse for not cleaning up the old one.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren to Star in ‘Last Five Years’ on Broadway

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      Whitney White will direct the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s popular musical, which plans to open next spring.Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are planning to star in a production of “The Last Five Years” on Broadway next spring.Jonas appeared in several Broadway shows as a child; his one starring role was in 2012, when he stepped into a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and his most recent appearance on Broadway was for a Jonas Brothers concert stand last year.Warren is a Tony Award winner for playing the title role in “Tina.” She also had roles in Broadway productions of “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and “Bring It On.”“The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is about the breakup of a marriage. Critics have rarely warmed to it, but it has a huge fan base, and is widely staged. It has never been on Broadway, in part because it is so small — just two characters and one act. The show also has an unusual structure: the male protagonist, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story from beginning to end, while the female protagonist, an actress named Cathy, tells it in reverse chronological order.It was first staged in Illinois, at Northlight Theater, in 2001, with Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and then had an Off Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, with Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. In the decades since, there have been numerous national and international productions and adaptations. There was a film adaptation, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, in 2015. More recently, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry starred in a concert version in 2016, and at the height of the pandemic Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company staged a memorable streaming production filmed inside an apartment with Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas. (The number of licensed productions of the show doubled during the pandemic because the small cast and idiosyncratic narrative structure made it conducive to social distancing.)The Broadway production, directed by Whitney White (a Tony nominee for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), will be produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific producing entity run by Greg Nobile; ATG Productions, a subsidiary of British theater owner ATG Entertainment; and the Season, which is the new producing entity of theater marketers Mike Karns and Steven Tartick. More

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      ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ Review: A Shop Where Everybody Knows Your Mane

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      Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesn’t get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and more — tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.That will come in abundance, but don’t in the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, it’s telling you something too.What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late — almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A kind of “Cheers” or “Steel Magnolias” for today, “Jaja’s” is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the beauty shop’s interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, the director, Whitney White, keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.David Zinn’s beauty shop set receives applause as do the wigs designed by Nikiya Mathis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnlike the Ghanaian private school students in Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Dreams,” the stylists at Jaja’s are independent contractors. I don’t just mean financially, though they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping down to make room for the next.That’s fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shop’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. “When I get my shop, there won’t be any eating of smelly foods like this,” she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients. Meanwhile — and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salon’s television — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminata’s husband, the men we actually meet — all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos — are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.It’s her birthday: Kalyne Coleman as a customer who asks for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” braids at the salon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNever really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. Without White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t imagine this working. Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.If the entire play had been nothing but byplay — the women in one another’s hair both figuratively and literally — I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “School Girls” as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.But instead she has seen fit, again as in “School Girls,” to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Though abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the last of the play’s six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.“OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. “But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? ‘Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.Jaja’s African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More