The previously announced Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” directed by Camille A. Brown, now has an opening date. After beginning previews on March 4, 2022, the show will open on March 24 at the Booth Theater, producers announced Monday.
Brown, who will be making her Broadway directorial debut, choreographed the director Leah C. Gardiner’s well-received 2019 revival of Shange’s choreopoem for the Public Theater. But this Broadway production, which Brown will also choreograph, will be fully reimagined.
“Of all the shows to be given as an opportunity to debut as a first-time Broadway director and choreographer, “for colored girls …” feels like a gift,” Brown said in a news release Monday. “I’m thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to combine all the parts of myself — dance, music and theater arts — to shape and share this timeless story again with the world.”
Shange’s landmark work incorporates poetry, song and dance to tell the stories of seven women who are identified only by the hues of the dresses they wear. In his review of the recent Off Broadway revival, Ben Brantley detailed some of the show’s history as it made its way from bars and clubs to become “one of the most unexpected theater hits to emerge from the chaotic 1970s.” He added: “Shange’s free-form text was neither linear nor literal in its depiction of Black women struggling to claim their own voices from a society that had either ignored or actively silenced them.”
Shange has inspired many, and her death in 2018 prompted a renewed interest in her work. The playwright Keenan Scott II has credited Shange’s “for colored girls” as an initial inspiration for his debut Broadway production, “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” He recently said that in college, a class screening of the Shange work was his first — and essentially his only — exposure to theater by Black playwrights at the time.
Brown is a Tony Award nominee for her choreography in “Choir Boy.” She most recently choreographed and co-directed the Terence Blanchard opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in September. The Times’s dance critic Gia Kourlas said Brown’s step number for the opera “stops the show in its tracks.”
Casting will be announced at a later date.
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