This “The Color Purple” deserves to be the audience-pleasing, surprise hit of this holiday season.
This new, rousing version of “The Color Purple” based on the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker is not a remake of the 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg. This new “The Color Purple” is based on the much-revived and revered 2005 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical produced by Oprah Winfrey with a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman (“night, Mother”) and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray.
Directed by Grammy-nominated, Ghana-born Blitz Bazawule (“The Burial of Kojo”), the story once again begins in the Deep South in the early 20th century. We meet the oppressed Celie Harris (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a girl, Fantasia Barrino as an adult) – the role memorably played by Whoopi Goldberg in the 1985 film. Celie is a young mother of two children with her sexually abusive father Alfonso (a fine Deon Cole). The Cronus-like Alfonso snatches the children after they are born and takes them away, presumably to kill them. Celie finds comfort in the company of other women.
Her father arranges for Celie to marry the farmer Mister (a powerful turn by Colman Domingo), another abuser who is also attracted to Celie’s younger sister Nettie (Halle Bailey as a girl, Ciara as an adult).
