The Color Purple (2023)

This is a brutal story and changing it into a musical but remaining faithful to the story is a challenge that worked for me, but was not a home run. Music and The Color Purple have always had a close relationship, even before Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel became a hit Broadway musical in 2005. A blues singer is one of its main characters, a juke joint a key setting. Then there was the musicality of the novel’s literary style; Walker was already a published poet by the time she had written her first novel. The hit 1985 Steven Spielberg adaptation of her novel (the only version I am familiar with), was co-produced and scored by the legendary Quincy Jones, introduced the sensuous ragtime anthem “Miss Celie’s Blues,” which has been covered endlessly since. This musical expands on this idea, working its palette of blues, gospel, and jazz surprisingly seamlessly into a story that, at least on its surface, might initially seem too brutal for big, jubilant numbers--and that for me is the sticking point. I loved the music and the choreographed scenes--much more than I would have imagined--but it was hard to marry that feeling with the underlying story of men's brutality against women. On top of that, it is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. The story of Celie's brutalized life, and her eventual escapr is all too real, still happening to women across the country and around the world, and when all is said and done, not entertaining for me.