Tyler Perry, still unknown on this side of the Atlantic except to those who caught his cameo as Admiral Richard Barnett in Star Trek, is a behemoth on American shores, and he's just signed on to direct an adaptation of the 1975 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. We're prepared to put money down right now on that title changing prior to release.
What makes this project even more unlikely is the fact that Ntozake Shange's play is essentially 20 poems back-to-back, read by nameless women identified only by the colour they're wearing: Lady In Purple, Lady In A Sort of Bluey-Green-With-Hints-Of-Gray, that sort of thing. The play touches on love, abandonment, rape and abortion, although the subject matter may be tweaked, we suspect, for Perry's largely Baptist audiences.
The play was due to appear on Broadway last year, with Whoopi Goldberg producing and India.Arie starring, but the funding fell through. Then in March it was announced that music video director Nzingha Stewart would be adapting and directing it - and now Perry has it.
The filmmaking machine that he is - he's also got Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself opening on September 11 in the US and Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? on April 2 - he'll presumably have this one written, cast and edited by, ooh, next Tuesday.