THE COLOR PURPLE Returns

2631_Smith-Covington-Huds

It’s January, when the weather outside is usually frightful and even the biggest Broadway hits have tickets available.

Okay, not HAMILTON – but for most other shows, this is prime time to get the best seats. So have you been lollygagging on seeing a play or musical? As Sally Bowles might say, “Right this way, your seat is waiting.”

Get one, two or more for THE COLOR PURPLE, which in this new revival has proved a thesis that its first big song maintains: “The Good Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Only ten years ago, the musical version of Alice Walker’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film ran an impressive 910 performances; at that time, only 10 new musicals that had opened in our current millennium had amassed more. En route, THE COLOR PURPLE received a whopping 11 Tony nominations, including Best Musical. Only HAIRSPRAY, SPAMALOT and THE PRODUCERS could boast of more in this new century.

True, the only Tony that THE COLOR PURPLE won came courtesy of La Chanze, deemed Best Actress in a Musical for dynamically playing Celie Harris. Although slavery had officially ended for African-Americans in the 1860s, one would never know it from young Celie’s life in 1920s Georgia. Her stepfather often raped her, resulting in her having two children by the age of 14. Then he married her off to Ol’ Mister, who often beat her and used her to tend his children. That Celie is separated from her beloved sister Nettie becomes just another painful fact of life.

Ol’ Mister is smitten with Shug Avery, a self-assured black beauty who turns out to be the pivotal character in Celie’s life. How this free-thinker impacts Celie may not please conservatives, but no one can dispute that Shug helps Celie feel good about herself – which is a first for the poor soul. It’s the start of a wondrous journey that this woman will take.

La Chanze and her successor Fantasia Barrino were wonderful in portraying the downtrodden young miss, but equally superb in this new revival is Cynthia Erivo, who breaks our hearts early on. A nice piece of theatrical non-realistic staging by director John Doyle sets the tone for the night: Celie pulls out a piece of white cloth, turns it into swaddling clothes, and there’s her baby. “Somebody’s Gonna Love You,” she promises, fully expecting that it’ll be she.

No. Her father takes away the child and delivers her to “Ol’ Mister” while bragging that his daughter “can work like a man.” What sympathy we feel as Erivo stands still as Ol’ Mister inspects her as a slave – or, to be more accurate – an animal. Erivo expresses Celie’s naiveté when assuming that the whip Ol ‘Mister holds in his hand is for his horse. Not always.

Instead, Shug Avery (Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson) arrives to whip Ol’ Mister into shape. Hudson unflinchingly displays what Shug learned at an early age: insist that people treat you with respect, and they’ll be cowed into doing so.

The hedonistic Shug turns out to be one of PURPLE’s most spiritual characters. She loves her neighbor Celie and finds worth in her when no one else around her does. And with an endorsement from such a confident beauty, Celie blossoms as quickly as those time-lapse-photography videos where flowers turn from buds to blooms before our eyes.

THE COLOR PURPLE follows the venerable musical theater tradition of offering two couples – one to spell the leads when they’re off-stage resting. Here, that’s Harpo, Ol’ Mister’s son, and his feisty bride Sofia. Kyle Scatliffe charms as the young man who so wants to please his Big Beautiful Woman, whom Danielle Brooks makes busty, lusty, defiant, and impossible not to admire.

And yet, Doyle should have seen to it that Sofia, after her lengthy ordeal, makes a less spectacular recovery. Original PURPLE director Gary Griffin more accurately had her recover slowly. He also aged Celie in both hair and demeanor, but Doyle has Erivo look the same at the end of Act Two as she did at the start of Act One. But as we learned from the blanket-turned-baby in the early scene, Doyle isn’t much concerned with realism.

Whatever the case, Erivo is a magnificent Celie, the victim who tries to be as brave as she can under atrocious circumstances. Erivo ensures that Celie keeps that inner strength in reserve, for she needs it when she’s reminded late in her life that sometimes people leave you halfway through the woods.

Doyle has streamlined the show, cutting a half-dozen songs and some dialogue, too. Would that he also excised the plot point that plagued the novel and the film, too: If Ol’ Mister doesn’t want Celie to know that Nettie has been constantly writing to her, why does he keep the letters that she’s written Celie? By having them around, Ol’ Mister constantly runs the risk of someone finding them and thus incriminating him. And it’s not as if he’s the sentimental type.

It’s the one hole in an otherwise solid plot. How strange that original librettist Marsha Norman and screenwriter Menno Meyjes retained, too. The score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray is not one of Broadway’s greats, but it does offer pulsating music and a nice boogie-woogie number, too. At least every song – each and every song — is brilliantly sung by the vocally blessed cast; the soon-to-be- released revival cast album will greatly impress.

The songwriters certainly gave Celie a fine eleven o’clock number. Some immediately stood after Erivo roared it out, but there is a good chance that they were also applauding Celie’s victory over her long-time adversaries.

THE COLOR PURPLE is mostly shown in the color sepia – and that decision, too, was Doyle’s; he designed the simple set. The distressed brown wood is fine for the scenes in rural Georgia, but the second act begins in Africa and later segues to Memphis. These are both colorful places, so the set should at least suggest them.

Purple and the other colors in the spectrum will show up before show’s end as a result of Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes that are most important to the plot. But as Celie’s life improves, so should the backdrop.

More and more, Broadway musicals save money by offering a unit set that makes little to no effort to establish where each vignette takes place. This true of this production, too, but Doyle compensates by having the action placed front and center right at the lip of the stage. We don’t mind the absence of scenery nearly as much as usual because the characters are so close to us that we concentrate on them and the rest becomes less important.

If two jobs — set design and direction — weren’t enough jobs for one man, Doyle took on the task of musical staging as well. Perhaps that’s why there’s so little of it. Most of the time what passes for dancing is the cast’s going from one step down to the floor and then back one step up. No one would dare call it “choreography,” and that includes Doyle.

That the show is in a smaller theater helps, too. How much smaller, you ask? Let’s put it this way: if you took the number of seats in this theater – the Jacobs – and added in the entire seating of the nearby Helen Hayes Theatre, you STILL wouldn’t have as many seats as there are in the Broadway Theatre where THE COLOR PURPLE originally played.

One of the strongest aspects of Doyle’s direction is that his cast often looks up and acknowledges those seated in the mezzanine and balcony. So even if January remains a busy ticket-selling month for THE COLOR PURPLE and upstairs is all you’re offered, you’ll still find yourself brought into the action, which will then have you bringing your hand to your moist eyes and cheeks.