Forgetting Their Roots

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Something strange happens in the last 15 or 20 minutes of “The Color Purple.” This enervating, tragically bungled musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel actually starts to work.


Emotions that had remained at a cavernous distance for more than two hours creep into view. The score, a numbing series of R&B-tinged mediocrities, begins to deepen, starting with a charming and unapologetically racy love duet. Celie, the long-suffering protagonist, finally claims her place in the center. From about 10:15 p.m. on, it’s a heck of a musical.


The two-plus hours leading up to this, however, is a mess. If anything, the pleasures of the last three songs actually add to the evening’s frustrations. If the writers were capable of this all along, how can they justify the watered-down pablum that leeches virtually all the emotion and grit out of Ms. Walker’s bruising tale of black life in the early-20th-century Deep South?


In creating the decades-spanning story of Celie (played here by LaChanze), an uneducated woman who slowly pulls herself out from under a nightmarish set of circumstances, Ms. Walker reached across the ocean to Africa and deep into her heroine’s complicated family tree. The novel devotes substantial time to a half dozen other characters, including Celie’s abusive husband, known to her only as Mister (Kingsley Leggs); Shug Avery (Elisabeth Withers-Mendes), the fickle chanteuse they both love; Nettie (Renee Elise Goldsberry), Celie’s beloved sister; and Sofia (Felicia Fields), Mister’s formidable daughter-in-law.


But “The Color Purple” was written as a collection of Celie’s diary entries to God and other correspondences, so even when the focus was on these other characters, her voice was never far. Director Gary Grif fin and librettist Marsha Norman have largely dispensed with this convention, nudging Celie further onto the periphery.


The musical’s problems go far beyond reducing the star to a virtual spectator for nearly the entire first act. They go beyond casting LaChanze, whose radiant smile and delicate bone structure have made her a compelling romantic lead in musicals for 15 years, as the supposedly ugly Celie. They go beyond composer-lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray’s “borrowing” of pop songs, from the Beatles’s “Come Together” to, of all things, All-4-One’s “I Swear.” (The latter tribute, which gets prominent placement in the overture, eclipses any of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s visits to the Puccini catalog.)


No, the biggest problem with “The Color Purple” is the creators’ need to entertain at all costs, even when that requires trampling on genuine human feelings. The perfect example of this comes in “Hell No,” an Act I number for Sofia (the role that Oprah Winfrey, who is “presenting” the musical, tackled so fearsomely in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie adaptation).


It’s a by-the-numbers anthem of female empowerment, in which Sofia vows to “show them, girl, / And beat back that jive.” The writers and Mr. Griffin know they have a crowd-pleaser on their hands – perhaps they noticed the “HELL NO” T-shirts being sold in the lobby – and so out come all the female chorus members, one after another, some of them carrying weapons, as they form a harmonizing army of girl power.


This makes no sense. Sofia is such a powerful force, capable of opening Celie’s eyes, precisely because there’s nobody else like her in that dusty Georgia town. If a song like “Hell No” is going to work – and the crafty Ms. Fields is perfectly capable of making it work – it’s because Sofia is giving voice to an idea that’s unthinkable from anyone but her. What possible excuse could you give for plunking these sentiments into the mouths of the town’s entire female population, beyond giving your number a big rousing finish?


The writers’ one potential improvement on the source material succumbs to similarly timid instincts. Midway through, Celie learns that her long-absent sis ter Nettie didn’t die, as she had thought, but has become a missionary in Africa. Her letters offer Celie a glimpse into an entirely new culture, and the musical takes advantage of this to transport Celie into a dreamlike interaction with the Olinka tribe.


But even this is botched: Choreographer Donald Byrd, whose work elsewhere in “The Color Purple” is spare but effective, resorts to overly broad African dance that verges on kitsch. Paul Tazewell’s dependably rustic costumes and John Lee Beatty’s wooden sets take advantage of the broader stylistic palette, but the rest of this scene is a missed opportunity, a capitulation to razzmatazz over craft.


Fortunately, the acting company far outshines its material. LaChanze does what she can to dim her appeal, jutting her lower jaw out and slumping her shoulders, but not even her tender, sensitively delivered efforts can yank Celie back into the spotlight. Ms. Goldsberry builds upon the promise displayed in this summer’s Central Park “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” proving equally captivating in a far less flashy role. Ms. Fields and Ms. Withers-Mendes both make welcome Broadway debuts, and Brandon Victor Dixon is adorable as Harpo, Sofia’s hapless husband. Only Mr. Leggs disappoints as an obvious Mister. (It doesn’t help when your big song includes the lyrics “So tell me how a man do good / When all he know is bad?”)


Back in 1985, Mr. Spielberg’s credentials as a legitimate dramatic filmmaker were still in question. Skeptics wondered whether a white director would do justice to the book. Even when Mr. Spielberg’s penchant for uplift sugarcoated Ms. Walker’s material, though, he succeeded because he saw the individuality in each character, right down to the menacing Mister. That level of specificity eludes Ms. Norman, although her libretto does show flashes of lyricism.


One such moment comes as a humbled Mister offers this life lesson near the end: “While us wonder about the big things, us learn the little ones kinda by accident. And the more us wonder, the more us love.” By this point, the score and libretto have finally slipped into gear and achieved a similar level of gentle, hard-earned strength. But do 20 minutes of intelligent craftsmanship atone for the unfocused plot and derivative music that came beforehand? Would anyone whose sole exposure to “The Color Purple” came from this production have any sense of the original’s strength? Hell no.


***


From the beginning, “The Color Purple” has attracted controversy within the African-American community over Ms. Walker’s relentlessly negative portrayals of men. Those sensitive to this criticism needn’t bother with Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter’s “In the Continuum,” which recently moved to the Perry Street Theatre after a limited run at Primary Stages. Anyone else, though, is encouraged to see this insightful, sobering yet surprisingly funny look at the global scourge of AIDS among men and especially women of color.


“Do I look like a junkie do I look like I’m gay do I look like I’m from Africa?” These are the words of Nia (Ms. Salter), the 19-year-old girlfriend of a high school basketball star in L.A., upon hearing the news that she is HIV-positive. The same news is met with identical shock and indignation by someone who actually is from Africa – Abigail (Ms. Gurira), an ambitious Zimbabwean anchorwoman. The rest of “In the Continuum,” sensitively directed by Robert O’Hara, follows these two very different women as they wrestle with nearly identical waves of anger, confusion, caustic wit and helplessness.


The extremely talented Ms. Gurira and Ms. Salter – who also play all the men and women that Abigail and Nia encounter – were graduate students in NYU’s acting program when they wrote the piece, and its origins show from time to time. Some monologues are more effective at showing off the performers’ range than propelling these women’s stories along. The script also falls into parallels (Abigail and Nia simultaneously learn of their ailment, avoid fender-bender, and fantasize about publicly denouncing their two-timing men) that give the play a distractingly diagrammatic feel.


But despite its subject matter, nearly every monologue contains at least a handful of laughs that are as emotionally accurate as they are welcome. These moments make “In the Continuum” all the more devastating, but they also give a human face to a disease so ostracizing that, as one character puts it, “you mention it and even the people you thought loved you will make you eat from paper plates.” Ms. Gurira and Ms. Salter have created a bracing, uncompromising piece that is as easy to watch as it is hard to forget.


“The Color Purple” (1681 Broadway, 212-239-6200).”In the Continuum” until January 14 (31 Perry Street at Seventh Avenue, 212-868-4444).


The New York Sun

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