The Color Purple
On Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
If you want to feel the earth move with the most powerful voices on Broadway, then The Color Purple is where you need to be. Cynthia Erivo and Jennifer Hudson are making big and beautiful noise like you have never heard before in this production. This is a powerful story of survival, love and forgiveness and the amazing strength of one very special woman.
The Color Purple traces the life of Celie (Cynthia Erivo) from the early to mid 1900's. By all accounts she’s a homely hard working girl. She has grown up in a life of abuse by her father who impregnates her twice and then strips her of her children. The only good thing in her life, is her pretty younger sister Nettie, but she loses her as well when Mister (Isaiah Johnson) comes looking for a wife, and her father gifts him a cow to take the ugly Celie as his wife.
Just when you think it couldn’t get worse for poor Celie, she becomes wife to yet another abusive man. Still only a girl herself, she is enslaved to caring for his children, to cleaning and cooking and to the bed of this man she has no love for. She has lost everything in life and even her sister Nettie is stripped away and seemingly lost forever. Years pass by before the sexy Shug Avery (Jennifer Hudson) comes to town. Shug is a worldy woman, she’s a singer and she’s been around the block more than once. She’s also the woman that was denied to Mister years before and one he’s been pining for ever since. She’s brought to the house to recover from illness and Celie develops her own fascination with Shug. They begin to grow close and Shug becomes her confidante and protector. Shug gives Celie confidence in herself as she sings ‘Too Beautiful for Words” and it's a beautiful moment when they share a tender kiss, embrace and love is born. Unfortunately Shug does not stick around for long but before she leaves she hands Celie a pile of letters she found from her sister Nettie who she thought was dead. This bit of happiness helps her through the loss of her new love. It turns out that Nettie has found Celie's two babies Adam and Olivia and they are living together in Africa as missionaries. Communications are interrupted when political turmoil strike Netties village and they are displaced, and Celie is alone again in despair. Easter comes and Shug returns with her new man Grady (Antoine L. Smith). She announces she is taking Celie to live with her in Memphis, and not even mean old Mister is a match for this strong willed and determined woman. Before they leave Celie puts a curse on Mister, and payback is a bitch. The dark cloud has finally lifted from Celie and she is living large in Shug and Grady’s fancy home. She’s a new woman, and has discovered her talent for clothing design. When she gets the word her father (actually we were somewhat relieved to find that he was actually her step father) has died and the house and store has been left to she and Nettie she returns to Georgia and starts up a business making clothing and she is dressing up the whole town in fancy pants of bright colors. “Look who’s wearing the pants now” . Celie has had enough of playing second fiddle to Shug’s long line of men and she gives her up for good and for the first time she is free. Mister comes to visit and is now a humbled man realizing the error of his ways and you can’t help but chuckle when he gets down on one knee and asks sincerely for Celie to marry him again and she responds “let’s us just be friends”. As the show closes we see Nettie returning with Celie’s two grown children, and our hearts are whole.
This is an astonishingly beautiful production under the direction of John Doyle. The set is stationary with the exception of the chairs that can be removed from their spots hanging on the ceiling to floor wood slat panels. I’m getting the impression that we may need a best supporting chair category at the Tony Awards this year. It’s amazing how many productions use chairs and implement them into the choreography. The score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray penetrates your soul as it is delivered by the bigger than life voices of Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Hudson, Joaquina Kalukango and the tremendous voices of the rest of this stellar cast. Superstar Hudson illuminates the stage and is everything you imagined, but there is no mistaking that Erivo is running this show as was evidence by the two standing ovations prior to the curtain. Walk through this field of the color purple and you will see the beauty that God has made. For tickets and more information visit http://colorpurple.com/ and check for available discounts here http://www.thisbroadsway.com/discount-tickets.html -ThisbroadSway 11/16/15