15/09/2026
Fifty years ago today, for colored girls who have considered su***de / when the rainbow is enuf opened on Broadway.
In 1974 Ntozake Shange started performing her poems in a women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, between sets, with dancers. She called what she was making a choreopoem, a word she had to invent, because nothing it did fit inside “play.” Poems, movement, music. Seven women, named only for the colours they wore.
She moved to New York and kept performing it. Jazz lofts, downtown bars, wherever there was a room. Then the Public Theater, where it sold out. And on 15 September 1976, the Booth Theatre. The second play by a Black woman to reach Broadway. She was in it, performing her own poems.
It ran for 742 performances. Nearly two years. It won a Tony.
Fifty years later, to the day, it is playing in London. To sold out crowds. To rave reviews. As it should.
Ntozake Shange forever.
