“She wants to take us to the Colored Entrance,” says Madea, who proclaims that she’s both country and ghetto - “You put that together, you get contretto.” No respecter of propriety, Madea preaches being true to your roots. She calls them “the black Beverly Hillbillies” and insists they come in through the back door. To Lilian, Madea’s family represents everything she has fought to escape. Eric reminds the Ivy League China that he went to a community college: “It ain’t Brown but it’s black.” Lilian believes that appearances are everything, and that her daughter can be fulfilled only if she marries into an even wealthier family. Tales of class as much as race, Perry’s plays contrast a group of rich people aping the white life style with poor people who are black and proud. True to Perry form, this Christmas story will eventually spill lurid family secrets all over the stage. China had once been in love with Eric his reappearance allows her to rethink her affair with Bobby. So China secretly invites the whole disreputable brood: Madea, fat Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis) and grown children Lucy (Alexis Jones), George (Jeffery Lewis) and Eric (Tony Grant). Lilian, eager to impress China’s super-rich beau and presumed fiancé Bobby (Shannon Williams), has insisted that Margaret work on Christmas instead of celebrating with her family. In the lavish, two-story set of a ritzy Cape Cod home, the members of the Mansell family - who can be identified without fear of stereotyping as mean mother Lilian (Chandra Currelley-Young), pompous father John (Maurice Lauchner), restless daughter China (Támar Davis) and virginal son Japan (Zuri Craig) - prepare for the holiday feast with the help of their saintly maid Margaret (Cheryl Pepsii Riley) and their ancient, mouthy chef Hattie (Patrice Lovely). (MORE: Read Richard Zoglin on the Tyler Perry stage experience) The evening is broad, hectoring, defiantly sentimental and, for the uninitiated, a revelatory gas. The plays are spectacles worth attending, in person or vicariously, and newcomers to the Perry gospel can get a concentrated dose of the experience in the DVD of his latest play, A Madea Christmas, taped in May at Atlanta’s Cobb Performing Arts Center. And Perry - outfitted as Madea in a garish housedress and fake saggy boobs - is a joyous anachronism too: trash-talking, truth-telling, 6ft.5in. Outsiders watching a Perry video are projected into another America: not just to the insular land of black popular theater, unlike anything on Broadway, but back in time to the chitlin’ circuit of the 1930s and ’40s, when segregated audiences got to see their own stars singing and joking about racial issues without having to worry whether the white man would get it. (Unlike the movies, the plays usually give each of the major actors, except for Perry, a potent R&B-flavored song to belt out.) A 2007 box set, Tyler Perry: The Plays, collects seven of these productions, performed on stage for an appreciative audience that cheers Madea, boos the villainous characters and shouts “Amen!” after the musical numbers. For that you must watch the DVDs of the original theater pieces that Perry would present in his Atlanta headquarters and then take on tour in perhaps a dozen cities, and which he later adapted into his films. (MORE: Read Richard Corliss on Tyler Perry’s success)Īctually, Perry’s movies - calculated combustions of domestic melodrama and low comedy, Saturday-night insult humor culminating in a Sunday-morning sermon - don’t display his raw art in its purest form. As a butt of critics, Perry is down in the seventh circle of Hell: Rob Schneider territory. And that’s not the average score it’s the sum total.
On the critics’ aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, three of Perry’s most popular pictures - Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion and Madea Goes to Jail - managed only a mediocre 68% rating. African-American commentators accuse him of demeaning his race, and most reviewers ignore or excoriate his movies. Yet outside his core constituency of older black women, Tyler Perry gets no respect. His low-budget films have grossed more than a half-billion dollars at the North American box office, and this year Forbes magazine anointed him the highest-paid man in show business, with earnings of $130 million.
#A madea christmas 2011 tv#
He built a multimedia empire by writing and directing homespun movies, plays and TV shows in which he frequently stars in drag as the sassy, preachy Mabel “Madea” Simmons. Follow week, we shine a light on a few big, worthy or just plain weird DVD releases.