Here's my review of The Color Purple, which will run in Friday's Calendar section:
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
Page to stage is a tricky process — all the more so when you’re dealing with a much-loved, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel which was made into a blockbuster film. So it’s disappointing, but not all that surprising, to see that all the seams still show in the stage version of The Color Purple, the 2005 Broadway musical that has made its way to Orlando in a national tour.
Only a gifted and spirited cast can compensate, at least partly, for a show that feels dutiful at best — a jumble of scenes stitched together with little sense of momentum or of the sweeping drama that made the book such a theatrical celebration.
That theatrical nature is all but gone in this over-broad adaptation, which began as the pet project of a producer rather than with writers who had taken it to their hearts. (Sure, Broadway producers are the initial force behind other shows, but The Color Purple comes off as the textbook example for a lack of creative spark.) Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray are all successful songwriters who have never written another musical, and their inexperience shows in a succession of negligible songs that don’t hang together as a whole.
Bookwriter Marsha Norman is a far more seasoned theater hand. But her successes with the Pulitzer-winning ‘night, Mother and the Tony-winning book of The Secret Garden just point to the fact that, even with the most gifted of collaborators, some projects don’t work out.
The Color Purple, of course, is the story of poor, downtrodden Celie, a 14-year-old in 1930s rural Georgia, who at the start of the story already has given birth twice to the offspring of a man she knows as her father. Celie is married off to a man she calls Mister, who treats her just as cruelly, and it’s only when she encounters a couple of strong women — first the headstrong, larger-than-life-size Sofia and then Shug Avery, the high-living jazz singer who comes to live with Mister — that Celie learns what it is to be loved and how to stand up for herself.
Novelist Alice Walker crammed all that and much, much more into a novel that may be just a little under 300 pages but feels chock full. In the stage version, though, the plot keeps coming at you, more and more of it, with no sense that it’s building to anything. When the scene shifts almost inexplicably to Africa, at the top of Act II, you get the sinking feeling that four or five more continents might be next.
The only way out is to see The Color Purple as spectacle, with John Lee Beatty’s handsome set of rough wooden trellises and field of grain stratching to the horizon, Brian MacDevitt’s pale pink-, orange- and purple-tinged lighting and Paul Tazewell’s gloriously colorful costumes, which change amusingly with the times.
And the way to enjoy that spectacle is to embrace a terrific cast of actors, nearly all with impressive credits, who bring life where there is none. Kenita R. Miller displays a huge voice and a sweet manner as Celie, although she’s strapped by Gary Griffin’s direction, which gives her no sense of sexuality; Angela Robinson makes a sensual, charismatic Shug, and Felicia P. Fields (nominated for a Tony for this role) is a comical Mack truck of a Sofia: Her sex-laced number with Stu James as Harpo, “Any Little Thing,” is a stitch.
James and Rufus Bonds Jr., as Mister, provide fine support, and the ensemble is terrific, especially Kimberly Ann Harris, Virginia Ann Woodruff and Lynette DuPree as a trio of gossips, Yolanda Wyns and Doug Eskew as a pair of church singers and all of the lithe, loose-limbed dancers. More than anything, this tour of The Color Purple makes you long for a better day — a day when there are so many roles for fine actors of color on Broadway that they’re not stuck in over-produced, under-nourishing fare like this.
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426. Read her Arts & Letters blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/artsandletters.
Theater review
‘The Color Purple’
What: Touring production of Brenda Russell-Allee Willis-Stephen Bray-Marsha Norman musical.
Where: Carr Performing Arts Centre, 401 W. Livingston St., Orlando.
When: 8 p.m. today-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
Cost: $38-$73.
Call: 1-800-982-2787.
Online: OrlandoBroadway.com.
Photos: Top, Kenita R. Miller as Celie. Bottom, Angela Robinson as Shug Avery. Photos by Paul Kolnik.