A rainbow of voices in ‘Purple’
Voices ululate, reaching new heights and then immediately new lows, slipping and skittering among every note in between, as if to sing one pitch is necessarily to loop-the-loop through all the others in its vicinity. Belts muster such volume as to practically take tangible form; to absorb them means there almost isn’t space for you yourself to take a breath. Then, the virtuoso solos melt away, leaving the
chorus in a quiet but perfectly blended gospel chord that thrums with the beyond.
And that’s just in the opening number.
“The Color Purple,” whose Tony-winning revival opened Wednesday, May 2, at SHN’s Orpheum Theatre, is all about the power of the human voice, both musically and more broadly. Adapted from the 1982 novel by Alice Walker, the musical follows Celie (Adrianna Hicks), a black woman in Jim Crow-era Georgia for whom horror is unremarkable. Incest defines her childhood, until her father (J.D. Webster) bargains her away to Mister (Gavin Gregory), who wanted to marry her sister Nettie (N’Jameh Camara) if he couldn’t marry his real beloved, the peripatetic entertainer Shug Avery (Carla R. Stewart). All the while, the men in Celie’s life beat her and taunt her with her ugliness — conditions Celie accepts as if they were scientific facts.
“The Color Purple” is an uneasy fit for the #MeToo era. With a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, the show lets both its audiences and its villains off too easy. We’re invited to condemn domestic violence and racism and then congratulate ourselves for being so enlightened, and then Celie’s chief abuser, her lifelong tormenter, gets to worm his way back into her life after she’s escaped him, all by doing just one good deed. The musical further implies that if Celie had just realized she were “too beautiful for words” all along, she might have been able to overcome her lot in life earlier. It’s a subtle form of victim blaming. Even as, superficially, the song attempts to elevate Celie, it papers over the deep societal structures that keep her down.
Hicks’ Celie contrasts markedly with Whoopi Goldberg’s performance in the 1985 film version of the story. Where Goldberg was still and quiet, eyes ever downcast, always in need of someone else to lift up her chin for her, Hicks is sly and quirky, rat-atat in delivery and so heavy on physical mannerisms that it seems strange the other characters don’t remark on them. It’s almost a little too easy for this Celie to transition from victim to independent entrepreneur, and other plot threads, under the direction of John Doyle, can feel just as arbitrary. In particular, the attraction between Celie and Shug flickers on and off almost as if it hadn’t happened at all.
But through it all, human desire is made sumptuously absurd, especially by Carrie Compere as Sofia and J. Daughtry as Harpo, lovers who writhe in pain at the thought of keeping their hands off each other. Lust infects the whole ensemble. In one riotous scene, a line of pistoning couples becomes the cylinders of an engine, revving up and then cooling off, jaunty in snaps of the back and whooshing in their horsepower.
And then there are those glorious voices, with superhuman bellows of wretchedly human pain. It’s particularly refreshing in the Orpheum Theatre, whose shows often rely too much on razzledazzle, to see those singers relatively unadorned. Doyle’s set design consists of little more than distressed wooden panels and chairs, which become everything from field hands’ tools to carpenters’ workbenches. In this musical, voices are all you need.