Reviewed
by David Spencer
Much of what I have to say here
will sound like damning with faint, or grudging, praise, and that's actually
not my intent. No, this is actually a positive review, and a sincere one. But I
have to write it truthfully too, and the truth is this:
Performances
aside, there's very little in The Color Purple that could not have been better. Marsha
Norman is only
a serviceable
librettist, and the pop song trio who wrote the score -- Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray -- are only competent in this, their first
foray into theatre writing, and most of the other elements too, choreography (Donna
Byrd), staging (Gary
Griffin, and I
distinguish staging from his direction, more on that in a bit) could also have
been realized better, each taken on its own terms. Presupposing, of course,
that those other, better artisans could have developed a similarly functional
collaborative gestalt, and there's no way to know.
Paradoxically, the genuine miracle of this musical adaptation of Alice
Walker's novel,
and the subsequent film made of it, is that
it remains focused, clean, coherent, even pushes the envelope a little. This is
one of those deals where having the right people in the same room, working on
the right material for their passions and talent, was enough to spark something
that, as a whole, is alchemically…I guess the word is greater…than their individual contributions.
And that
clean competence is going to keep it afloat for a long time. Because on top of
the fact that it delivers on what it promises, it dramatizes a signature work
of African-American literature, which tells a story inextricably welded to
African-American culture -- even if you wanted to, you couldn't recast the story
in another ethnicity, or remove its ethnicity, lest it no longer make any
sense. Thus, the black community will add their ticket buying force and
considerable presence to the audience, merely for having something of quality
that's theirs.
Where
the show pushes the envelope is in managing to conquer two narrative obstacles
that no other musical has conquered successfully.
The
first: The heroine is passive for a long stretch of the first act. Musicals,
because they are compact and elevated, seem to demand active characters at
their center. Characters who are passive, or ciphers, tend not to be
sympathetic because they're targets or underwritten; and they create focus
problems -- because musicals also demand thrust, which requires a character
driving the story. When drive isn't present, supporting characters take over
and the ride loses definition.
Yet in
Celie (LaChanze),
we are presented with a poor, black girl in the deep south -- she has been
abused and raped by her stepfather (JC Montgomery) and by the age of 14 has given
birth to a boy and a girl, both taken away from her, and winding up she knows
not where. Shortly after, in a business arrangement, she is "sold" to
Mister (Kingley Leggs) to be his wife; though Mister would have much preferred her
prettier sister Nettie (Renee Elise Goldsberry). Nettie is Celie's one
meaningful connection with family and love, for life with Mister is similarly
brutal and abusive. At length, Nettie is forced to escape town, reluctantly
leaving Celie to fend for herself. Though by now Celie is beginning to, just
beginning to, articulate her needs and desires and act on them.
Now in a
certain sense, Celie is not wholly passive. Unlike, say, Charlotte Bronte's classic Jane
Eyre (heroine of an ill-fated musical of some seasons back), she is not a
bewildered spectator in her own life. Celie's dreams and desires are implicit,
in her attachments to her confiscated babies and her sister, plus her
admiration for the hefty, brazen Sofia (Felicia P. Fields) who won't take no
mistreatment from no
man; so Celia,
even in silence, is locked onto the goals of re-connection and claiming her dignity. Thus, in a way, Celie's a
ticking time bomb. We know her passivity will end as soon as she turns the
corner where she can start to control her own fate. And it's a gradual process,
that emerges in fits and starts. In effect, the creative team of The Color
Purple have made
the passivity feel active because Celie always looks and feels ahead, rarely pausing for
introspection or self-pity. When her first act of resistance inspires Mister to
say he'd never seen just sitting around before, she challengingly replies:
"What it look like?" And it's the first track marker in an escalating
series of catharses, for which the audience, with a little restraint, cheers.
And that
leads to the second way in which The Color Purple does something new. General
wisdom has it that it's hard to cover an epic span of time in a musical. Again,
the compression and broad strokes endemic to the form resist sprawl. (i.e. 1776
is not the story
of John Adams; it's about a selected, brief period in his life when he tried to
get a very specific thing done.) But Celie's story is one that spans several
decades. Here too, her growing self-sufficiency, her dreams of connection --
which now involve not just her kids and her sister, but her first real romantic
and physical love, with club singer Shug (short for Sugar) Avery (Elisabeth
Withers-Mendes)
-- define a specific journey that can only reveal narrative focus if framed
against the passage of time. It's a remarkable anomaly in musical theatre
literature -- and in its way the exception that proves the rule. (I think the
only other successful musical in the cannon to pull this off is Show Boat, and it pays to remember it has
never been presented the same way twice. Each new revival seeks new ways to
conquer the narrative, rejiggering the book so that the multiple storylines
stay aloft without loss of tension or focus. The recent Hal Prince production
probably nailed it as definitively as anyone could.)
The
score is pleasant, appropriate, effective and efficient without ever being
transcendent or iconic. For the most part, the songs have proper dramatic
function, and for the most part, niceties of craft are adhered to. There is a
small complement of false rhymes, but interestingly, they seem so much a part
of the patois (as
I recall, all or most emerge from genre type songs reflecting Southern black
culture, such as gospel hymns and folk tunes) that even these craft violations
seem like appropriate (if not altogether necessary) choices.
Under
the direction of Gary Griffin, the performances are, in the best sense,
absolutely fine without any being truly electrifying; and the staging, as I
indicated earlier, is sufficient without ever being memorable. But where the
jury's out on Mr. Griffin is his influence on the writing team. Without inside
information, it's really impossible to know exactly what a director's
responsible for, in terms of focusing the piece, keeping the writers on the
path -- even though ostensibly the director is project leader, once you're into
rehearsals. Jerome Robbins made thematic focus his signature; Trevor Nunn not
so much. But if Griffin, to any significant degree, was the keeper of the
overview, the guy who kept the writing team on point, especially given all the
ways in which The Color Purple could have failed, then he has the potential to be a
serious contender for the new millennium A-List. It's a knack that, if he has
it, cannot be underestimated.
All in
all, the checkmarks go into the WIN column for The Color Purple. They're not writ large, but
winning is winning. And miracles needn't rumble and thunder, or even be
perfect, in order to be miracles...