Take a long, hard look at this clip, y’all. This could be what awaits you—in theatres everywhere—in six months.
By now, we all know that Tyler Perry is well on his way to making Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. He’ll be adapting a screenplay for it, directing it, and producing it. Of course, he should only be wearing one of these three hats. (Guess which.)
I won’t belabor this.
We all have our reservations. Yours may be the very real possibility of Madea as the Lady in Blue.
Mine have to do with the fact that Perry just announced his intentions to adapt this on Thursday and plans to begin filming in two months. He’s also boasting a 2010 release. We all know that the quicker Tyler Perry makes a film, the shoddier it looks, the crappier the acting, the jankier the poster.
So what we have to look forward to is a picture of Taraji P. Henson superimposed in a yellow rose (or Kimberly Elise in an African violet); a trailer that looks more like a screen test; and casting that includes a formerly chart-topping singer (say Whitney, as part of her comeback junket?), an Oscar nominee, and a couple people from Perry’s stage plays or TV shows.
Worst of all—for me, at least—is knowing how much more sense it would’ve made for Perry to simply produce the Broadway revival of the play that was already underway last year until the financing fell through. We know that his theatre efforts haven’t fallen by the wayside, as he just sent out a national tour of some “stage play” called The Marriage Counselor a year ago.
This would’ve been his chance to briefly depart the chit’lin circuit and infiltrate the Great White Way. This is a man who owns his own production studio, complete with soundstage. Surely, he’d love to add a Broadway credit to his heavily plumed hat, right?
What would’ve been the problem with hiring someone awesome to direct and making a larger, but far more rewarding financial contribution to the Broadway effort? He could’ve still called it Tyler Perry’s Tyler Perry Version of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls: A Broadway Production. No one would’ve begrudged him that.
To be sure, it would’ve been superior to the film he’s going to throw together in six months, with a trailer he’ll start to air as early as March or April of next year.
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