One Woman's Awakening, in Double Time
*
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: December 2, 2005
TIME doesn't just fly in the exhaustingly eventful world of "The Color Purple," the musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel and film of the same title that opened last night at the Broadway Theater. It threatens to break the sound barrier. In faithfully adapting Ms. Walker's incident-crammed 1982 Pulitzer Prizewinner about Southern black women finding their inner warriors, the show's creators have fashioned a bright, shiny and muscular storytelling machine that is above all built for speed.
So much plot, so many years, so many characters to cover in less than three hours. Or, as one of the many vibrant heroines sings, prettily papering over a gap of eight years, "So many winters gray and summers blue." From the brass-warmed opening bars of its eclectic overture, this musical has an on-your-mark, get-set quality that promises that pages will be flying off the calendar as if in a tornado.
Watching this beat-the-clock production summons the frustrations of riding through a picturesque stretch of country in a supertrain like the TGV. The landscape looks seductively lush and varied; the local populace seems lively and inviting, like people you might want to know; you can even hear tantalizing snatches of folks singing in an intriguing idiom as they go about their work. But it all passes by in a watercolor blur. This show isn't stiff and anemic like its chief musical competition this season, "The Woman in White" (another plot-crammed adaptation of a novel). But it never slows down long enough for you to embrace it.
Would that "The Color Purple" did take time to stop and smell the lilacs. Directed by Gary Griffin - with a book by Marsha Norman and songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray - this show is blessed with a surfeit of performing talent. There's not a clinker among the major cast members, led by LaChanze as the downtrodden, man-mangled Celie, whose sexual and social awakening over four decades gives the story its shape.
As for the rest of the production, there's a sumptuousness throughout that, while hardly true to the harrowing bleakness of the early chapters of Ms. Walker's novel, does bring to mind the enjoyably hokey cinematic ravishments of Steven Spielberg's 1985 film version. (You don't ask yourself, as you often do on Broadway these days, how the show could cost as much as it did - $10 million, in this case.) John Lee Beatty's sets summon rural poverty in Georgia in the early 20th century with a romanticizing, fairy-tale sense of wonder, enhanced by Brian MacDevitt's sunset-and-starshine lighting and Paul Tazewell's handsome period costumes.
The trio of songwriters for "Purple," all making their Broadway debuts, have backgrounds mostly in pop, film and television. And they clearly have a knack for clingy, synthetically tasty melodies adorned with spicy regional accents (rather like Cajun-style Kentucky Fried Chicken.) Or at least I think they do, since no sooner is a song started than it is killed to make way for yet another narrative-propelling number. (Ditto with Donald Byrd's sprightly fits of choreography.)
Thanks to the cast's spirited way with a song, "Purple" strikes some sparks during its long and winding journey. But it takes a concentration and leisure the show lacks to fan sparks into a steady flame.
The overwhelming breathlessness of this production is probably unavoidable, given its determination to hew as close as possible to its source. Ms. Norman is an eminent playwright whose " 'night, Mother" won the Pulitzer for drama the same year that Ms. Walker's novel did for fiction. And Ms. Norman brings a refreshing if dogged writerly respect to Ms. Walker's work.
But the novel - which contrasts the lives of stay-at-home Celie and her traveling missionary sister, Nettie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) - covers not only four decades but also three continents. Related largely in bluntly vernacular letters written by Celie to God and to her sister, the book's central focus is the feminist evolution of Celie, who at 14 is sold in marriage to an abusive older man (called Mister and played here by Kingsley Leggs), after having given birth to two children by the man she believes to be her father.
"The Color Purple," though, is also the story of other, more innately forceful women from whom Celie gathers the strength to find herself. In addition to Nettie, who discovers her ethnic identity while a missionary in Africa, there's the strapping and defiant Sofia (Felicia P. Fields), Celie's stepdaughter-in-law, a role created on film by Oprah Winfrey (a producer and invaluable promoter of this show). And the voluptuous, pleasure-seeking Shug Avery (Elisabeth Withers-Mendes), a saloon singer and sometime-mistress of Mister, initiates Celie into the joys of the flesh and is most important to her growing self-esteem.
It is to the credit of each of these confident actresses that their characters register as emphatically and winningly as they do in the midst of the narrative rush. Ms. Fields and Ms. Withers-Mendes both exude a sensual energy that you can feel the audience wants to luxuriate in. (The same impression is cut, in a sunnier vein, by Brandon Victor Dixon as Sofia's cheery husband.) But every time they work toward musical climaxes, that darn hydra-headed Story intervenes with another plot twist.
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Many of these are related by a hyper-lively quartet of gossiping church ladies. Others, set in Africa, come from Nettie's letters to Celie. Even a big dramatic aria like "Mister's Song" winds up spending an awful lot of time recapping events the audience already knows and undercutting Mr. Leggs's best dramatic efforts.
Mr. Griffin, acclaimed for his ingeniously miniature productions of big-scale works like "Pacific Overtures" and "My Fair Lady," emerges mostly as a skillful traffic conductor here. He keeps things moving at a jaunty clip, even when the events are as ugly as rape, domestic abuse and racial violence. This discrepancy would probably be jolting if you had time to think about it.
Amid the whirlwind of story lines, LaChanze holds admirably steady in what is a rather thankless part. Since Celie spends much of the show being scared and downtrodden, LaChanze must hide her considerable natural light under a bushel of homeliness and self-effacement. And her long-delayed survivor's anthem, for which she is allowed to pump up the volume, is unfortunately a generic power song. (Sofia's truncated "Hell No!" and Celie's top-40-ready duet with Shug, "What About Love?," are better.)
At the show's end, Celie has acquired, in addition to gray hairs and a personal fortune through the making and selling of pants for women, an air of matriarchal dignity that she wears like vintage couture. And it occurred to me that somewhere along the way in her odyssey of survival and triumph, Celie had morphed into a heroine of the kind of inspirational women's fiction found in airport bookstores, written by Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steel.
These are authors I would never have thought to compare to Alice Walker. But such things happen in adaptations that emphasize sheer story over sensibility. Devotees of Ms. Walker's novel would be better off thinking of this show less as "The Color Purple" than as, say, "Celie: A Woman of Independent Means."
The Color Purple
Based on the novel by Alice Walker and the Warner Brothers/Amblin Entertainment motion picture. Book by Marsha Norman; music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray; choreographed by Donald Byrd; directed by Gary Griffin; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Jon Weston; hair design by Charles G. LaPointe; production managers, Arthur Siccardi and Patrick Sullivan; production stage manager, Kristen Harris; general management, NLA/Amy Jacobs; music director, Linda Twine; dance music arrangements, Daryl Waters; additional arrangements, Joseph Joubert; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press; orchestrations, Jonathan Tunick; music supervisor and incidental music arrangements, Kevin Stites. Presented by Oprah Winfrey, Scott Sanders, Roy Furman, Quincy Jones, Creative Battery, Anna Fantaci and Cheryl Lachowicz, Independent Presenters Network, David Lowy, Stephanie P. McClelland, Gary Winnick, Jan Kallish, Nederlander Presentations Inc., Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Andrew Asnes and Adam Zotovich and Todd Johnson. At the Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway, at 53rd Street; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
