Fantasia: "The Color Purple"

 Toward the start of Marsha Norman's musical version of "The Color Purple," Celie makes her "I Want" declaration, and her audience is her sister, Nettie:

I want to sit and do nothing--

Fix you a new dress.

Hope my babies are happy--

Some place God will bless.

This seems like a small wish--if you compare it with "Wicked," or "Evita," or "Children of Eden"--but it's not small. It's not small because many people in Celie's world want her dead. She is raped by a man who claims he is her father; she is separated from her children; she is sent to live with a man who never bothers to disclose his own first name. She is beaten and abandoned (repeatedly). So it's sort of stunning that she does, ultimately, find a life where she can do professional sewing and spend time with a family. It's like conquering Argentina and launching a Rainbow Tour.

In her various battles, Celie enlists help from two main allies. One--a friend named Sofia--suggests that you don't have to invite anyone to beat you (and, in fact, you can fight back). The other, a singer named Shug Avery, suggests that pleasure is not a bad thing; God is actually not a man, but a range of colors, sensations, and natural phenomena. If you aren't pursuing your own pleasure (sensual and otherwise), then, probably, you are "pissing God off."

Celie is bright and talented, and she makes use of her friends' advice. She evicts the man who has been assaulting her for approximately twenty years, then she launches a business. Finally, she throws herself a party--which, oddly enough, involves her own "babies," who are clearly happy, and in "someplace God has blessed."

This is the story, and it's too much for a musical. You feel sort of breathless as the events unfold onstage. In the new movie, matters are worse, for a few reasons: The director cuts the "I Want" song (bizarre), truncates the Celie/Shug love story, adds an unneeded subplot involving Shug's father, and (most inexcusably) shortens and rewrites the 11-o-clock number, the show's famous interlude, in which Celie realizes that she is not a doormat. 

All that said, the images are beautiful, and it's hard not to get weepy in Celie's last half hour. Additionally, Danielle Brooks brings down the house.

These are my initial thoughts--not a full review--but I enjoyed myself (warts and all).