Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Color Purple A New Musical Soundtrack

The stage musical adaptation of Alice Walker's 1982 novel The Color Purple (also based on the 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg), with a libretto by Marsha Norman and songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, opened on Broadway on December 1, 2005, and quickly turned into one of the season's major hits. At first blush, Walker's epic story of the travails of a poor African-American woman in rural Georgia during the first half of the 20th century, with its elements of rape, incest, and domestic violence, might seem an unlikely subject for musical theater, but the form has supported equally difficult projects successfully (Les Misￃﾩrables wasn't exactly musical comedy), and one might as easily say that The Color Purple is an inspiring tale of women's resilience, camaraderie, and empowerment. It is certainly dramatic, which makes it a good stage vehicle, and the setting allows the songwriters obvious avenues to pursue. Not surprisingly, the score heavily employs gospel forms, beginning with "Mysterious Ways," an early song that easily could be heard in a church any Sunday. The character of the singer and prostitute Shug Avery (Elisabeth Withers-Mendes) gives the songwriters the opportunity to write blues material, although, in fact, blues elements appear prominently in the music throughout. The only oddity in the score is the songwriters' determination to mix those styles with more traditional show music, if one can by now refer to the sort of adult contemporary ballad material that began to be heard on Broadway in the 1980s as traditional. Whenever the show takes a turn toward the sincere and heroic (which is to say, whenever one or more of the several saintly female characters is moved to express her feelings), the music swells, the Southern accents fall away, the grammar noticeably improves, and out comes something that sounds like the light-FM/TV commercial/American Idol nexus of overwrought yet bland pop music meant to draw tears or sell French fries, as the case may be. "Somebody Gonna Love You," "Too Beautiful for Words," "What About Love," "The Color Purple" -- in this score, the listener is never far away from one of these numbers, and mixed in with the blues and other material expressed in heavy vernacular speech, the effect is disconcerting, as if a radio signal kept switching back and forth from one kind of station to another. LaChanze, in the starring role of Celie, displays versatility in adapting to the various musical styles, and Withers-Mendes, Felicia P. Fields (as Sofia), and Renￃﾩe Elise Goldsberry (as Nettie, in an isolated African segment, "African Homeland") all have showcase parts. But the music they have to work with is more than just highly varied; it's highly inconsistent in both style and quality. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide