The best-known members of the Wayans showbiz family, including writer-director-actor-producers Keenen Ivory Wayans, Damon Wayans, Shawn Wayons and Marlon Wayans, plan to tour the United States with a hybrid sketch/stand-up show in 2014.
No specific dates or venues have been set, according to a Reverb interview today with Keenen Ivory Wayans, but the brothers’ shifting schedules have finally aligned to make the tour possible.
“Right now everybody is in the clubs getting it together and preparing,” Keenen said. “That’s really what the motivation was: that we all wanted to do a family tour. It’s something we’ve talked about for years but never really had the time, and now everybody’s got some time to really work on the material and get their acts together.”
Keenen, the group’s ostensible leader who’s visiting Denver’s Comedy Works club Oct. 3-6 to polish material for the tour, is responsible for a number of trailblazing films and TV shows.
He was a producer and writer on Eddie Murphy’s stand-up film “Raw” (1987), writer, director and star of the blaxploitation satire “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988), creator and co-star of the groundbreaking Fox sketch series “In Living Color” (1990-1994) and writer-director of the first two “Scary Movie” films — the first of which was the highest-grossing domestic film ever from a black director.
So will we see some familiar characters from TV’s “In Living Color,” a show that launched the careers of stars like Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey? It’s certainly possible, but Keenen said he prefers to focus on the future — especially since he recently decided to cancel a rebooted pilot of the show.
“I’m more into moving forward than I am into recycling things,” he said of the possibility of an “In Living Color” reunion, package tour or major Blu-ray/digital re-release. “It was lighting in a bottle, so I don’t want to try to do that. People ask me about a reunion every day but… it’s time to move on.
He did, however, promise that the tour would show many sides of his family’s talents, and while Keenen’s he’s not as well-known for his stand-up as, say, his brother Shawn, it’s still something he holds dear.
“It’s going to be a combination of sketch and stand-up,” said Keenen, who has been telling jokes on stages in New York and Los Angeles for the last two decades. “I do stand-up all the time. I never stopped, I just have never done a special and I’ve never gone out on the road. It’s not how I’ve made a living so I’ve never really had to do it, but my stand-up is my foundation. And it’s funny — every project I do, I get more into stand-up because it just puts you in touch with your funny.”
By John Wenzel Of The Denver Post
