Tyler Perry Land

Tyler Perry Land is a piece of intellectual property as valuable and deep-seeded as Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. It ain't real estate but it is where Mr. Perry's characters live. So you can complain of false motivations and false emotions if you want while Why Did I Get Married Too?, Tyler Perry's latest opus, mines the same lucrative vein of middle-brow humor and angst he has worked for years.

The gang's all here from Why Did I Get Married only it is four years later and the locale for confrontations and shocking revelations has moved from the snow white of Colorado to the white sand of the Bahamas. There has been much adding and subtracting. Dianne (Sharon Leal) had relented and given Terry (Tyler Perry) the son he desperately wanted while Sheila (Jill Scott) has traded up from Mike (Richard T. Jones) to Troy (Lamman Rucker) and made Troy a proud papa, too (Officer Troy's deep well of bed-rock confidence, so appealing in WDIGM, was apparently left in Colorado when he and Sheila relocated to Atlanta so she could be closer to her family and friends). Meanwhile, Marcus' (Michael Jai White) career is on the ascent while Angela's (Tasha Smith) has been buffeted by the recession. The only couple maintaining status quo appears to be Patricia (Janet Jackson) and Gavin (Malik Yoba).

The wheres and whys of a Tyler Perry plot are often too tortuous, ridiculous and/or fantastic to repeat but he understands how to play his peculiar and particular audience, cueing up tears, laughter, hoots of recognition all the while retaining the ability to shock if not surprise. Perry's plays taught him how to please an audience, how to clown like a master and how to move people with jokes and a song. It is a stage savvy; a performer's savvy. In years of relentless touring with his self-authored and self-financed plays, Perry has learned and honed a craft.

~rave!