Camille A. Brown Will Direct Broadway Production Of For Colored Girls

Camille A. Brown, who is a Tony Award nominee, is going to direct Ntozake Shange’s  For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf on Broadway in 2022. It will be Brown’s debut on Broadway as a director.  

Brown served as a choreographer for a 2019 production of the play off-broadway at The Public Theater. She will be will work as a choreographer on the Broadway show making her the first Black woman to serve as both a director and choreographer on a Broadway show in 65 years. 

She previously choreographed Once On This Island and Choir Boy and became the first Black woman to receive a Tony nomination in two decades for her work on the latter. Brown is also known for her work on Jesus Christ Superstar Live In Concert, the Netflix film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess. She is the founder and artistic director of the award-winning dance company Camille A. Brown and Dancers. 

“It’s an amazing feeling to bring this seminal show back to Broadway 45 years after it opened at the Booth Theatre on September 15, 1976. I look forward to diving into the divine Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem and celebrating her legacy” said Brown. Producer Ron Simons says, “It is an honor to help usher the return of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking work to Broadway under the direction and choreography of Camille A. Brown, who is herself blazing a new path on Broadway as the first Black woman in more than 65 years taking on this dual role, I am quite confident that the ancestors and Ntozake’s spirit are lifted.”

Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf premiered in 1976. The author called it a choreopoem and it chronicaled the survival stories of seven women living in a sexist and racist world. Tyler Perry’s 2010 For Colored Girls was a film adaptation of the production.