#151
Posted: 5/17/07 at 8:50pm
Another amazing review from talkinbroadway.com
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/ColorPurple2.html
It’s any writer’s responsibility to strive for originality and to travel the least obvious and expected roads whenever possible. But sometimes one must openly give into clichés, for nothing else will do. This, I’m afraid, is one such time. Three simple, predictable words have haunted me ever since I revisited The Color Purple, so I must beg your indulgence just this once.
Fantasia is fantastic.
But if the words have now escaped into the world, the memory of what inspired them will linger for decades to come. 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.
I expected as much of Fantasia here, unsure how anyone so young (she’s 22) and so inexperienced could carry this all-singing, all-hulking adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel when the production’s original lead, LaChanze, a bona-fide theatre star, could not. It seemed a given that Marsha Norman’s hit-and-run book and Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray’s pop-slop score were designed to sink anyone who dared step into the central role of Celie.
But it didn’t take Fantasia long to not only shatter memories of LaChanze, but completely upend the idea that this was a show from which no drama could be drawn. Fantasia’s raw, unfinished quality and rough-hewn features quickly proved perfect for Celie in ways that LaChanze’s gleaming, beaming refinement and carefully preserved beauty never could be. A victim of her father’s sexual abuse who’s married off to a man named Mister who treats her only marginally better, Celie is a woman who’s known pain and looks it. As Fantasia plays her, she is determined to never know it again.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/ColorPurple2.html
It’s any writer’s responsibility to strive for originality and to travel the least obvious and expected roads whenever possible. But sometimes one must openly give into clichés, for nothing else will do. This, I’m afraid, is one such time. Three simple, predictable words have haunted me ever since I revisited The Color Purple, so I must beg your indulgence just this once.
Fantasia is fantastic.
But if the words have now escaped into the world, the memory of what inspired them will linger for decades to come. 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.
I expected as much of Fantasia here, unsure how anyone so young (she’s 22) and so inexperienced could carry this all-singing, all-hulking adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel when the production’s original lead, LaChanze, a bona-fide theatre star, could not. It seemed a given that Marsha Norman’s hit-and-run book and Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray’s pop-slop score were designed to sink anyone who dared step into the central role of Celie.
But it didn’t take Fantasia long to not only shatter memories of LaChanze, but completely upend the idea that this was a show from which no drama could be drawn. Fantasia’s raw, unfinished quality and rough-hewn features quickly proved perfect for Celie in ways that LaChanze’s gleaming, beaming refinement and carefully preserved beauty never could be. A victim of her father’s sexual abuse who’s married off to a man named Mister who treats her only marginally better, Celie is a woman who’s known pain and looks it. As Fantasia plays her, she is determined to never know it again.
Updated On: 5/17/07 at 08:50 PM
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