Knowing 'Purple' adds to enjoyment

Staging a musical such as The Color Purple shares many of the challenges of, say, making a movie of Harry Potter. Most of the audience read and loved the book. Or, in the case of The Color Purple, they read the book and they loved the movie.

These are hard acts to follow. First there was the 1983 epistolary novel by Alice Walker that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Then, there was the 1985 Steven Spielberg film, which featured stars such as Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg and Lawrence Fishburne. Typically, the impulse to compare and contrast the genres colors our enjoyment.

But here, in the first North American touring production of The Color Purple, running through May 18 at the Hippodrome Theatre, the music transports you to another realm and allows you to banish such analytical impulses. It actually helps that most of the audience has probably read the book and seen the movie, because the effort to squish a plot spanning 40 years into three hours of musical theater necessarily gives short shrift to character development and compresses plot twists.

This is an evening best enjoyed as an impressionistic pastiche of gorgeous music and colorful dance that hits on the touchstones of racism, poverty and sexism that the book is known for elucidating in great detail.

Produced by Oprah Winfrey and Scott Sanders, the production's score, featuring blues, pop, gospel and jazz, was created by a trifecta of composers who had never done a musical before. Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray had impressive resumes in the pop-music genre but describe this as their first foray onto Broadway. (The New York show opened in 2006 and closed in late February.)

Directed by Gary Griffin, The Color Purple tells the story of Celie (played masterfully by Jeannette Bayardelle), who is 14 and pregnant with her second child when the show opens in 1909. Celie's father (Quentin Earl Darrington), who also fathered her children, takes them away from her after each birth and gives them to another family to raise. Celie's greatest love and comfort in life is her sister Nettie (LaTonya Holmes, who filled in for LaToya London on Tuesday's opening night), and when Nettie disappears, Celie's life falls apart.

By now, her father has married her off to a man she knows only as "Mister" (Rufus Bonds Jr.). He beats her and forces her to work like a mule. As the years pass -- and I am compressing this only slightly more than the show itself -- Celie draws confidence from two women in her life, her stepson's wife and her husband's ex-lover.

Sofia, her stepson's wife, quite literally rocks Celie's world. Played by wonderfully comedic actress Felicia P. Fields, Sofia is a huge woman who, with the help of the orchestra's pounding drums, shakes the ground as she makes her way onstage and into Celie's life. Sofia takes no guff from her husband, Harpo (Rhett George) -- or anyone else.

In the show's most rousing number -- "Hell No!" -- Sofia shows Celie an alternative to the downtrodden, submissive view of womanhood Celie embodies. When Harpo's father tells him that he should beat his wife into submission, Sofia fights back.

"I'll kill him dead before I let him hit me," she insists. Rather than kill him, she decides to move back home to her family of strong women. While one sister stands guard with a shotgun, Sofia's five other sisters load up a cart with her babies, her chairs and a washboard. "He try to make me mind," Sofia belts. "I just ain't that kind. Hell no!"

On the heels of Sofia's departure from her life, the illustrious, outrageous and outspoken jazz singer Shug Avery (Angela Robinson) comes to town to visit old friends. She ends up recovering from exhaustion at the house of Celie and Mister, her old lover.

The most delicious part of The Color Purple comes during Celie's sexual awakening -- when she finds herself aroused while helping Shug bathe and later when Shug kisses her. In the first instance, Celie does everything she can to keep from looking at Shug's naked body in the tub. She looks skyward. She looks to the left. She looks out at the audience. She looks down at the ground. But in the end, the other woman's magnetism is too much for her to resist.

And while the audience never sees the nude Shug, Celie's response, when she finally lets her eyes drink in Shug's form, tells us all we need to know. The character's sheer delight in her new, super-sensual friend is writ large.

While the play has heavy gospel overtones, Alice Walker's God is clearly just fine with homosexuality. This production does not shy away from making that point. Celie registers no shame at being attracted to women, and even the chorus of gossiping church ladies who wag their fingers and sniff at all things unconventional takes an interesting turn here. When Celie goes away to live with Shug and her husband, the church ladies raise their eyebrows about a threesome but not their lesbian arrangement.

In this protracted coming-of-age story that spans four decades, Celie's sexual awakening and growing independence tease us, hinting that this will be a tale of feminist empowerment. But in the end, we are served up feminism-lite: Women can and should assert themselves, as long as they remember it is He -- the big Mister in the sky -- who allows it.

The Color Purple ends in a rousing gospel of praise, with the entire cast shouting ecstatically "ahhhhh," to which Celie adds, in conclusion, "men."

>>>If you go The Color Purple runs through May 18 at the Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St. Showtimes vary. Tickets are $34-$80. Call 410-547-7328 or go to france-merrickpac.com.

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