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April 20, 2022

Don’t be fooled by the scaffolding that wraps around the exterior of the Booth Theater, doing its dour best to look uninviting. Inside is a Broadway homecoming celebration that you will not want to miss: the triumphant return of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf” to the stage where it was a hit in 1976.

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April 20, 2022

Poet-playwright-dancer Shange—who originated the role of Lady in Orange, one of the show’s seven color-coded characters—died in 2018, but this rousing revival testifies to the magnitude of her imagination and the unyielding power of the female voice.

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April 20, 2022

Director and choreographer Camille A. Brown and her cast of seven female singer-dancer-actors breathe life and vitality into Ntozake Shange’s still-potent mid-1970s touchstone for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. Opening tonight at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, Shange’s fantasia of poetry, dance and stories of confession, defiance, sisterhood and, above all, perseverance, holds a power that’s not been weakened either by decades or the loss of a once startling newness.

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April 20, 2022

Brown, who has become the first Black woman to serve as a director-choreographer on Broadway in 65 years, was an ideal choice for helming the revival, infusing it with modern dance and coordinating its visual and lyrical elements into a striking pattern. The seven women (including Amara Granderson, Tendayi Kuumba, Kenita R. Miller, Okwui Okpokwasil’i, Stacey Sergeant, Alexandria Wailes, and D. Woods) handle their solo pieces beautifully while also forming a tightly-knit ensemble.

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April 20, 2022

This revival of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” is one link in a chain of productions re-introducing the work of our titans — Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy and more — to modern audiences. Only Shange’s work has been on Broadway before, first premiering at the Booth Theatre, where the revival is currently playing, in 1976. It remains a seminal, sacred text; one I’ve been able to recite phrases from for the better half of my life. This revival, by director and choreographer Camille A. Brown, is the most essential production of Shange’s masterwork to date.

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April 20, 2022

The real strength of an ensemble cast shines through when each actor brings their own gifts and value and exhibits them in ways that only add to the larger value of the production. We see Amara Granderson (Lady in Orange), Tendayi Kuumba (Lady in Brown), Kenita R. Miller (Lady in Red), Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green), Stacey Sargeant (Lady In Blue),  Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple), and D. Woods (Lady in Yellow)—all in their glory but not in a way that competes for attention.

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April 20, 2022

Her soft, excited wishes fill the intimate space of the Booth Theater in New York City, kicking off Camille A. Brown’s rendition of the playwright’s canonical choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough. The production, which opens April 20, takes the task of revival seriously — it’s a joy to witness.

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April 20, 2022

The same could ultimately be said of this production of For Colored Girls. The work is good because the text is good—because Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem is one of the best and most important works of 20th century American art. In rushing to bring it to the new millennium, though, this revival forgets to stop and listen to its own words. It’s not an ideal production, but if you can focus on the words themselves rather than the other stimuli thrown your way, it remains essential, vivid, and affirming.

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April 20, 2022

An awkward question nags at audience members during the play “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”: Just how relevant is this show anymore? The sluggish revival of the 1976 drama, which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, doesn’t make a particularly compelling case for its up-to-the-minute-ness.

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April 20, 2022

It’s been over 40 years since the abstract “choreopoem”‘s first Broadway run, and the new ensemble of seven women performing For Colored Girls… (which has circled back to its original Broadway home at the Booth Theatre) is no closer to conquering that metaphysical dilemma. But neat resolution would only cramp Camille A. Brown’s invigorating production — a celebration of Black, female community that finds a pot of gold in its company’s embrace.

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April 20, 2022

Ntozake Shange’s play, the “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, was revived in a wonderful production at the Public Theater a few months before the pandemic closed down theater. Now that revival arrives on Broadway (Booth Theatre, booking to Aug. 14), directed by its choreographer, Camille A. Brown.

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New York Theatre Guide
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Juan Michael
Porter II

April 20, 2022

Ntozake Shange’s powerful paean to Black women, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, returns to Broadway in a bold revival that burns intensely, though with little nuance. As directed and choreographed by the much-lauded dancemaker Camille A. Brown, this production places an exclamation point at the end of its title, as if to claim that it will punch through every moment of grief until all that is left is celebratory victory.

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April 20, 2022

Not to get too mystical about it, but this impeccably performed, exquisitely choreographed revival manages the same for many of us out there in the dark. Dance, said Shange, allowed her to understand the planet the way “atomic particles experience space.” If that’s so, then atomic particles must love each other wildly. They must always be so grateful to see each other, whenever gravity — or a revival — draws them back into one another’s arms.

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New York Theater
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Jonathan
Mandell

April 20, 2022

“for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf “ opens tonight in a glamorous and, in one way, newly inventive production directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown.

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