I included this collection when I taught lit courses at the university. We listened to passages and read others aloud in class. One of the high points of my career occurred when a former student majoring in drama who was directing a production of the collection asked me to spend an evening with the cast to discuss the poems.
The solo picture of magnificent Ms Brown puts to my
mind Africa draped in a tangerine cloud.
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Saw it this week. V well acted. But def past its sell date. What were they thinking ?
@GC It's a Classic and we are honoring the art and beauty of an ancestor.
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As a white boy enrolled in CUNY’s theater department in the 1970s, I was lucky enough to have had the life-changing experience of seeing “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” (that’s how Ntozake Shange spelled it) on Broadway five times. Trazana Beverley’s soul-shattering (and Tony-winning) delivery of “a nite with beau willie brown" will remain with me forever.
I still have my first edition of the hardcover text, but I wish someone at Columbia Masterworks, which released the original cast album on LP (I have no idea which company owns the rights in 2019) would re-release it on CD.
It took until 2009 for Tennessee-based ArkivMusic to release a CD of the original cast album (also recorded by Columbia Masterworks) of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman revision of Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera” which played at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1976/1977 (the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music did not approve the translation used and did its best to even keep it from being recorded).
Maybe with a few calls or letters to Sony (which I believe is the successor-in-interest to Columbia Masterworks) or ArkivMusic might show there is a demand to hear the documentation of those glorious first colored girls.
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Ntozake Shange was a guest on an early Sunday morning NBC TV show. We rehearsed before the show, just her and the stagehands. When we first heard her lyrics we laughed, but after a while, everyone was mesmerized by her performance. She was a brilliant artist who impressed a hard-bitten bunch of guys who had seen lots of theater.
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Saw it in Boston, 1982ish. Still get goosebumps when I think about it.
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I saw what I think was the original New York production in a small church in Manhattan in 1975 - featuring the great Trazana Beverley. She brought down the house.
I wish I could remember exactly which church.
Anyway, it was a revelation.
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