Word: madea
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...went to Madison Square Garden to see Tyler Perry's new musical, Madea's Big Happy Family, a day after I sat through a Broadway revival of Noel Coward's 1939 play Present Laughter. I noticed a few differences. In Coward's play, the main character, a famous stage actor, spends most of the evening in a dressing gown delivering bons mots to an entourage of fellow theater people. In Perry's show, a sharp-tongued grandmother delivers sassy put-downs and motivational lectures to a brood of squabbling family members. Coward's plot reaches a climax as the actor...
...popular unsung playwright in America. Raised in a poor and abusive home in New Orleans, he staged his first musical play, I Know I've Been Changed, in a former Atlanta church in 1998. Two years later he introduced his most famous character, the wisecracking, God-fearing granny Mabel (Madea) Simmons - played by Perry in a plus-size print dress and silver wig. Since then he's turned out a steady stream of plays (on which his films are based) that tour the country, playing to African-American audiences on a modern-day version of the "chitlin' circuit," the segregation...
...stage work gets little mainstream attention. Indeed, critics were not invited to see or review Madea's Big Happy Family. I bought my own ticket and sat near the back of the nearly full Madison Square Garden theater, one of the early stops on a tour that will stretch into May. (Next week: Jacksonville, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.) It was a bracing reminder that popular theater is still thriving in America - well under the radar and way off Broadway...
...Madea's Big Happy Family, like most of Perry's work, is an odd hybrid of populist comedy-drama, rock concert, revival meeting and motivational seminar. The broad comedy, stereotyped characters and simple set (a two-story family house, living room downstairs, bedroom upstairs) give the show a TV-sitcom feel - an impression reinforced by the video screens that project the action simultaneously, even edited with two-shots and closeups...
...lines, rafter-raising gospel and R&B songs, an inspirational Christian message (Shirley, on her deathbed and surrounded by the family, sings to her last breath - then reappears as a white-robed angel ascending to Heaven to finish the song) and the alternately jokey and hectoring presence of Madea. She is the irresistible center of gravity, dispensing both specific advice ("You've been tricked!" she tells the guy with the pushy fiancée. "Tricked by drug dealers! Get a job!") and all-purpose bromides ("If you think good things, good things got to come back...