It's not a bad show. It has some good music. I thought Felicia Fields and especially Elisabeth Withers gave outstanding supporting performance. But here's my chief complaint:
The Color Purple is Celie's story. In the musical, Celie tends to fade while still in plain view. Even with performers as charismatic as LaChanze or Fantasia, there was no dressing up the fact that the role isn't equivalent to what Celie's position in the story should be. I mean, she doesn't even get a solo until ten minutes before the curtain falls.
In regards to a production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another poster (either here or on ATC) commented that when you leave the theatre and are raving about Big Mama, something's wrong. Well, if you leave
The Color Purple raving about how well-constructed Harpo and Shug were, you're on equally shaky ground.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
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