Heres the link
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/ColorPurple2.html For the monumental Broadway debut currently in progress at the Broadway doesn’t just transform the winner of season three of American Idol into the most capable, most assured, most innately gifted new stage star to appear in years. It’s also effected a metamorphosis on an entire musical that last year ranked a solid “can miss,” but is now an emphatic “must see.”
No change so complete has occurred in my theatregoing experience, never has a show that started as at best a lumbering bore become an energetic, vivifying tribute to life and theatricality just by obtaining a new star. Some will point Jonathan Pryce’s recent stint in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, still others to country star Reba McEntire’s replacing Bernadette Peters in the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun. But neither was well served: Pryce was suave but out of control, and McEntire was out of her element, singing twangily but bearing at best rudimentary acting skills.
The audience reaction to this number at the performance I attended recalled the fabled screams of ecstasy so often attributed to Jennifer Holliday’s rendition of “And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” in the first production of Dreamgirls. I can’t say it was unwarranted. Nor can I say that Fantasia’s American Idol season-mate Jennifer Hudson, who played Holliday’s role in last year’s Dreamgirls film and won an Oscar for it, brought to it even half the confidence and emotional clarity Fantasia does to Celie here.
Updated On: 5/20/07 at 09:16 PM
