A self-described “musical about love,” “The Color Purple” puts the audience into emotional overdrive with excessive displays of human nature, both good and evil.
But because the play was produced by Oprah Winfrey, the audience should not have expected less.
Mere minutes into the play, we find out Celie (Jeannette Bayardelle) is unwittingly pregnant with her step-father’s baby. He proceeds to take the baby away from her moments after its birth, and though the audience doesn’t know what he does with the baby, based on his frigid demeanor, the outlook is grim.
This unfortunate event is hardly the end of Celie’s or the play’s woes. She is poor, black, a woman in the early 1900s and, to top it off, ugly. The only beacon of light in her life is her sister, Nettie. But even that gets taken away when Celie presumes her dead after losing correspondence.
As if the rape, teenage pregnancy, incest and absent sister weren’t enough, Celie is sent off by her abusive stepfather to marry an equally abusive husband. Had things continued down this route for long, the play might have become unbearably melodramatic, even for Oprah’s audience. And if the audience had just wanted to watch a director slowly torture his characters, they would have rented “Welcome to the Dollhouse.”
But luckily, this is a musical. A character’s pent up woes have to come through in song, and the vocals and dance sequences were fantastic on multiple fronts. Bayardelle’s voice lived up to Celie’s intense feelings. With a soulful, booming voice that nearly brought the house down, Bayardelle has a power that should have been used sooner and more often during the show.
A close second in vocal prowess came in the form of the far more lovable Sofia, played by Tony Award-winning Felicia Fields. (In the 1985 film version, this role was played by Oprah herself.) A walking fat joke, Sofia provides more than just cheap comedic relief, she represents the ability of abused, battered and bossed-around women everywhere to stand up and say “Hell no!” which is fittingly one of the songs. One of the show’s highlights was when Fields flung her considerable heft on top of a substantially less bulky character and attempted to smother her in her bosom.
Throughout the story, Sofia’s influence, combined with the devil-may-care attitude of seemingly everyone’s part-time lover Shug Avery (Michelle Williams, known most notably for being a member of Destiny’s Child), helps Celie find her voice and confront her fears.
Despite the corny, quintessential Oprah-like reunion at the end, “The Color Purple” is worth seeing for the earth-shattering vocals, especially funny dance scenes, and the entertainment of sitting among dignified theater-goers while a fat woman and a comparatively fragile man get low on stage. This may not be the definitive musical about love, but it was definitely way more fun this way.
““ Lauren Evans
E-mail Evans at levans@media.ucla.edu.