The Color Purple Reviews- Page 5

[Mamie]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 8:17am

I know. I should have added that my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek when I said that! My apologies.

[Corine2]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 8:31am

I gave Color Purple a rave a few weeks back.
I am seeing the show a second time next week and I can't wait.
Felicia Fields and La Chanze gave the performance of a lifetime.
Updated On: 12/2/05 at 08:31 AM

[Corine2]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 8:31am

Felicia Fields deserves a Tony Nom. Updated On: 12/2/05 at 08:31 AM

[Amy Archer]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 9:22am

I'm sure your rave is very reassuring to the Color Purple creative team, Corine, given your great gift with the English language.

[Garland Grrrl]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 9:28am

i'm so happy to see this slate of reviews. i was afraid they'd get killed.
as for the next SITPWG -- i think guettel is the likely candidate. but i also want to mention andrew lippa -- highly underrated -- not a sondheim but maybe a jerry herman of sorts.

Updated On: 12/2/05 at 09:28 AM

[TheEnchantedHunter]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 9:30am

>>Given that Ms. Walker's writing is sentimental enough as is, the results may make you feel like going straight home to beat your spouse and foreclose on a mortgage.<<

That well may be the funniest line I have ever read in a review.

Tilde Kooeck
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

[Bwaydreams01]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 10:51am

anybody think Elisabeth will be nominated for Best Featured Actress? I adore her in this show.

[BSoBW2]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 11:53am

Elisabeth or Felicia - I am pulling for Felicia!

[uncageg]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 12:01pm

The reviews were as I had expected. Especially Talkin' Broadways. I really don't like his reviews. They can be so off the mark. A lot of what I felt about the show was reflected. I knew that the pacing would come up and the long 2nd act opener. They were the only real problems I had with the show. I also thought that the book was a little weak but that could have been overcome with a slower pace in my opinion. Just glad it didn't get totally ripped to shreds.

[zelda]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 12:31pm

if you didnt see Wonderful Town with Donna you missed the show. The infusion of energy and pure talent she has made that show enjoyable and a gem.

[Broadwaylady]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 12:54pm

I got my tixs for February 11th. I can't wait.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:25pm

Here's John Simon's take from Bloomberg.com -- he liked it for the most part:

"The musical version of Alice Walker's novel ``The Color Purple' at the Broadway Theatre reaches two built-in audiences. It is a black-pride and liberal feel-good show, which doesn't make it bad, only somewhat formulaic and unsurprising.

The show is heralded as ``presented by Oprah Winfrey,' who was Sofia in Stephen Spielberg's hapless movie version. Like the movie, the musical simplifies and vulgarizes the novel, forfeiting the virtues of gradual development and understatement.

The fault is not with Marsha Norman's book, which actually finds ways of compressing and theatricalizing the material. But theatricalizing is not the same as being inherently theatrical, spread out as the novel is in space and time.
_______________________________________________________________

It would take genius to encompass all this without becoming caricatural, which the show rather does. Unblessed with genius, the composer-lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray nevertheless provide a serviceable score, and Norman comes up with an effective chorus of three female busybodies commenting on the action.

There is fluid scenery by John Lee Beatty, dramatic lighting by Brian MacDevitt, competent staging by Gary Griffin, adequate choreography by Donald Byrd, and crucial orchestration by Jonathan Tunick. All performers, headed by the admirable LaChanze, give their prodigal best, with no lack of acting and singing ability. If this suffices for you -- and it may -- go ahead and enjoy.

[Garland Grrrl]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:36pm

i'm glad he managed to get through that without using the word "pickininny". i was holding my breath.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:40pm

OK, Garland Grrrl, that made me laugh out loud.

[DAME]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:41pm

Margo.. any word on what the box office intake has been this morning?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:45pm

I haven't heard anything. I imagine if there's a significant bump, Playbill will report it either later today or Monday.

[Garland Grrrl]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 1:52pm

to know i made margo laugh has made my day. he once used that word to describe alfre woodard and i will never forget it.

[BSoBW2]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 2:50pm

Wow. That IS a great word though...

[Garland Grrrl]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 2:58pm

so is "fascist".

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 3:09pm

Entertainment Weekly (Scott Brown) gives it a C+:

"A question hovers over the new Oprah-produced musical adaptation of The Color Purple, Alice Walker's harrowing feminist epic of hard-bought emancipation: Can a story of incest, race hate, domestic violence, and clandestine lesbianism really be transformed into an Oliver!-esque Broadway melodrama-ganza? After nearly three hours, the answer comes back: Yes. But this isn't it."

[Roninjoey]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 3:47pm

Garlandgrrrl, what has Jerry Herman done on par with SITPWG that makes you think of Lippa? You're right though, I do kind of think of Lippa as this era's Jerry Herman in training.

Does anybody else hate the phrase "unblessed with genius"?

Although it does conjure up some funny images. I keep picturing Sleeping Beauty...

[Garland Grrrl]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 3:56pm

i'm certainly not equating herman w/ SITPWG --i'm saying Guettel is the likliest one to write a SITPWG type magnum opus ala Sondheim( this was a point of discussion earlier in the thread) --but not to forget other well-loved composer-manque like Andrew Lippa. Lippa has a couple new shows in the works and i think he will emerge distinctly over the next 2 years.

Updated On: 12/2/05 at 03:56 PM

[Roninjoey]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 4:30pm

Oh, so you were just randomly bringing him up. I'm not much of a fan of Lippa's work so far but I think he has a lot of potential to do better things (or just things I'll like more) so I'm certainly not counting him out either.

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 9:59pm

any more reviews?

[aegeusrocks]

Posted: 12/2/05 at 10:30pm

Chicago Tribune is mixed-to-negative and was one of the few I've seen that didn't like LaChanze's perf, but Chris Jones isn't its best theater/arts critic (I'm surprised they reviewed it at all)-
Oprah's 'Purple' hits Broadway earnest, flawed

By Chris Jones
Tribune arts critic
Published December 2, 2005


NEW YORK -- The musical version of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" has been eight years in the making. It gestated outside the traditional Broadway power structure -- the producer is a Broadway neophyte, the songwriters are from the pop world and the director is a Chicagoan, Gary Griffin, making his Broadway debut. As the rare serious musical these days with an original score, the show now is openly relying on a producer named Oprah Winfrey to prove and promote its bonafides.

To find the popular audience that might just love this piece more than critics, the show will need all the help that Winfrey can provide.

Vastly improved from its pre-Broadway incarnation in Atlanta, Griffin's ambitious production opened here Thursday night with its dignity intact and no cause whatsoever for embarrassment by any of the impassioned parties involved. This is an earnest, honest, intermittently engaging and competently directed attempt to wrestle the chronological sweep of Walker's epic and intensely personal novel about the 40-year journey to self-worth of an abused rural Georgian named Celie into an accessible, middle-brow Broadway musical. It is an almost impossible task.

And those who felt that the 1985 Steven Spielberg movie gave this tough, sexualized work an insipid purple haze will appreciate this modestly scaled (by Broadway standards) musical's narrative integrity, the restoration of the lesbian theme and the palpable determination not to run from any of the novel's legion, inter-generational pain. This also is a starmaking showcase for the Chicago actress Felicia P. Fields, whose huge-hearted, leather-lunged performance as Sofia is the strongest acting on the stage.

But "The Color Purple" ultimately fails fully to overcome the daunting challenges of the material and the limitations of using songwriters from a field other than Broadway.

The book (by Marsha Norman) and the score (by the team of Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray) never feels seamless. The score is composed of efficient individual numbers -- in styles ranging from R&B to jazz to pop to Broadway. Especially now they've been shaped and honed, many of these ditties are decent. The anthemlike title song lodges in the skull. There's a sweet "I Want" ballad called "What About Love?" And the dance number "Brown Betty" bristles with life. It will make a very lively cast album.

Serious themes

Some of these numbers, though, tend to jar with the seriousness of the theme. After seeing Mister (Kingsley Leggs) beat his wife, we're not necessarily ready for a jaunty number called "Big Dog." And therein lies the rub.

What's needed at that wrenching moment -- and in numerous other spots -- is the style of music you find in shows such as "Ragtime." Namely, epic compositional motifs that make it possible for a musical to sweep, novel-like, across the decades without clunking or falling out of joint. That just isn't happening here. The diverse music neatly matches the scene -- African scenes get African-style music and so. But the score mainly misses the articulation of Walker's overall arc.

The other problem is the pivotal central performance -- pivotal because this novel, when you boil it down, is about one character -- Celie. People will have widely differing views of LaChanze, the single-named star with a huge voice and buckets of talent and intensity. And her role, for sure, is under-scored -- she gets to really sing much too late in the show.

But I also find the portrayal of Celie to be insufficiently vulnerable. And although her pain feels real, there is a contemporary, urban sensibility to its angry expression, and it doesn't feel rooted in the rural simplicity of Macon County, Ga., in the early decades of the 20th Century.

By contrast, Fields oozes Sofia from the tips of her toes. And given that her opposite number, Brandon Victor Dixon's Harpo, is far stronger than the frequently uneasy Leggs (whose second-act reformation song is a clunker), it's the second-tier who light up this show, along with a terrific ensemble.

As Shug Avery, Elisabeth Withers-Mendes has the difficult task of playing a character with whom everyone is obsessed. It's solid enough work, but not quite enough to stop you from wondering why.

That would probably be an impossible task for any actress. And, indeed, as "The Color Purple" rushes across the years, you marvel at the enormity of this task. Necessarily, pivotal events that take pages in the novel are dealt with in a few measures of music -- or, worse, somebody shows up with news in the middle of an entirely different song. It often feels unsatisfactory. Then again, who could come up with another way to do it -- barring a more abstract approach, which would then probably kill the musical's commercial potential? Like Celie, the show has been dealt a tough hand from God.

Cutting scenes

The most startling change from Atlanta is the excising of the scene wherein Sofia is beaten up by whites (it's now reported quickly and second-hand). It takes away a dramatic scene for Fields, and it diminishes what's surely one of the major pillars of Walker's book -- that rampant mistreatment and abuse among these African-Americans is a consequence of the racism of the larger world in which they live. But given the complexity of the source, such are the sacrifices that must be made.

It's no surprise that by far the best scene in the musical is the last one, a nicely restrained picture of reconciliation set at a picnic. The pressures of storytelling over and their cheeks no longer purple from over-extension, Griffin and the songwriters finally are able to paint a full and authentic musical picture of life as it was lived. If anyone were ever to do this over, God help them, this would be the place to start.