How Long Is The Color Purple Play

Review: 'The Color Purple' on Broadway, Stripped to Its Essence

The Color Purple: NYT Critic's Option; Broadway, Musical; ii hrs. and 35 min.; Open Run; Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 Due west. 45th St.; 212-239-6200

December. ten, 2015

Give thank you this morning, children of Broadway, and throw in a hearty hallelujah. "The Colour Majestic" has been born again, and its conversion is a celebrity to behold.

The heart-clutching, gospel-flavored musical that opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on Thursday dark — in a production led by an incandescent new star named Cynthia Erivo and, in her Broadway debut, an enchanting Jennifer Hudson — share a title, the aforementioned characters, the same source of inspiration (Alice Walker'southward 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) and nigh of the same songs with "The Color Royal" seen on Broadway a decade ago. Just, oh, what a divergence there is between them.

That earlier "Colour Purple," a box-office striking, was a big, gaudy, lumbering creature that felt oversold and overdressed. The current version is a slim, fleet-footed beauty, simply attired and beguilingly small-scale. Don't exist deceived, though, by its air of humility. In that location's a deep wealth of power within its restraint.

As miraculous every bit this transformation may seem, it takes hard work, ruthless editing and a spark of genius to make a miracle on Broadway. That's certainly true of this "Color Purple," which (then as now) has a volume by Marsha Norman, with songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. The man in accuse here is the Scottish-born John Doyle, the newly all-powerful artistic director of the Classic Stage Visitor, who fabricated his name by stripping musicals — specially works by Stephen Sondheim ("Company," "Sweeney Todd") — downwardly to their bare essentials.

It'southward an approach that has been called gimmicky, peculiarly when Mr. Doyle has his bandage doubling as its own orchestra (which is not the case with this latest endeavor). Simply mostly, his formula has proved remarkably sound; information technology allows audiences to null in on a show'southward musical and emotional essence, while seeming to place narrative control directly in the hands of the performers. In a Doyle production, the characters own their own stories.

This sensibility is a perfect lucifer for "The Color Purple," a portrait of African-American women coming into their own in rural Georgia during the first half of the 20th century. Ms. Walker's novel is presented as a series of letters, more often than not written by its heroine, Celie, to God and to the dear sister from whom she is separated. This allows the radical changes that occur during Celie's life to register not merely through her clarification of events only too through the evolution of her increasingly confident voice.

The original Broadway product, directed by the talented Gary Griffin, aimed for a panoramic issue, not unlike that of Steven Spielberg's overripe 1985 film adaptation. And while Celie was played near appealingly by LaChanze, she tended to wait pocket-sized and lost as the prove rushed through its eventful xl years of plot, like a valiant marcher in a history parade viewed from the height of the bleachers.

Mr. Doyle'southward version, previously staged at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, puts Celie and her sisters in suffering and triumph forepart and center. His set up suggests a cozy abstraction of a well-scrubbed single-room wooden house, furnished with straight-backed chairs that hang from the rear wall.

It's a sepia-photograph-toned world (a color scheme carried out by Ann Hould-Ward's costumes and Jane Cox's lighting) of bare necessities, waiting to be populated by hungry imaginations. Only in the 2nd human action, as Celie reads letters describing her sis's piece of work as a missionary in Africa, are bright colors introduced into the palette. By the end, it's Celie herself (who becomes a successful article of clothing designer) who brings colour to her drab, globe-toned world.

Video player loading — Jennifer Hudson, with David Jackson on piano, sings "Also Beautiful for Words" from the Broadway revival of the musical "The Color Imperial." The show opens in December at the Jacobs Theater.

Ms. Norman's script has no overarching framing device — no "I remember" or "Dear Reader" structure — yet the effect here is of a story coming to life in the telling. All those chairs are stages from which yarns tin can be spun. The first words we hear accept the plangent resonance of childhood remembered: "Hey, sista, whatcha gon' do?"

The question is sung by Celie (Ms. Erivo) to her sister, Nettie (Joaquina Kalukango); it's part of a habitual game-playing chant, reminding the states that, in many means, these girls are yet children. Yet Celie, at 14, has already borne (and lost) two babies by the human being she believes to be her begetter (Kevyn Morrow). Soon she will be sold into marriage to the whip-wielding Mister (an astringent Isaiah Johnson), who reminds her that she is poor, blackness and ugly — and trapped.

The story of Celie'southward liberation is borne on a river of fluidly intermixed songs and spoken words that, every bit is often the case in cherished family unit anecdotes, bypasses long stretches of years and brings isolated events into ascendant relief. If the story sometimes feels awkwardly tall, particularly its wish-fulfilling 2d human action, the musical forms information technology takes seem convincingly indigenous to its time and place.

There is, inevitably, gospel telephone call and response, the devotional fervor of which Celie comes to resent (nobody's answering her prayers) and later to cover on her own terms. Fieldwork songs figure, too, reflections here of Celie's domestic slavery. And so at that place are the songs of resistance, embodied with verve past two very different women who help Celie learn her own strength: Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and Shug Avery (Ms. Hudson).

Portrayed every bit a homemade steamroller by the wonderful Ms. Brooks (of "Orange Is the New Black"), Sofia is the strapping wife of Harpo (Kyle Scatliffe), Mister'due south son, and she'southward non virtually to let any man dominate her effectually. Shug, a flashy honky-tonk singer, is Mister'southward erstwhile mistress, though no single lover owns her. Usually, she'southward played as a brazen, Bessie Smith-way blues diva.

Ms. Hudson, though, brings a softening vulnerability to Shug that suggests that, like Celie, she'southward been partly pushed into what she'south get past how men regard her. Best known every bit a recording artist and "American Idol" finalist (who also won an Oscar for the movie "Dreamgirls"), Ms. Hudson radiates a lush, supple stage presence that is echoed by her velvet vocalization.

We see the tenderness — and the demand to be cared for — that Celie sees in Shug. And we understand why these mismatched women would fall for each other. Their climactic duet at the end of the first human activity ("What About Love?"), for all its gentleness, is nevertheless the virtually sensual beloved song on Broadway this flavor.

But the greatest joy of all, at least for longtime believers in theater mythology, is the ascendancy of Ms. Erivo, who was very skilful when I saw her in London but is fifty-fifty better here. Celie undergoes a desperate metamorphosis from battered, invisible wife to determined, cocky-reliant businesswoman. Ms. Erivo escorts us through these transformations with a subtle merely tensile functioning that parallels her character'south development.

Like the residuum of the show, she never oversells herself; she asks us politely but compellingly to listen, even when she speaks in a whisper. By the product's stop, Celie has developed a muscular vox that reaches to heaven, and Ms. Erivo has emerged equally a bona fide star who lifts the audience to its anxiety.

This is as it should be. Celie may have started off cowed and self-effacing, just nosotros've ever sensed that at that place'due south a rare spirit inside, just waiting to be coaxed to the surface. That about sums upward Mr. Doyle'due south relationship, too, to this vitally reincarnated musical.