"The Color Purple" and Its Star are Radiant

I'm usually no fan of director John Doyle's work. It always strikes me as too self-congratulatory about how clever it is. But Doyle's revival of The Color Purple knocked me out. And that's almost entirely because he had the good sense to cast Cynthia Erivo as the show's star when it played at London's Menier Chocolate Factory in 2013 and to bring the relative unknown here for the Broadway production.

So much of the pre-show publicity for this musical version of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about black women who learn how to take possession of their own destinies centered around the casting of Jennifer Hudson, the pop singer and Oscar-winner for playing Effie in the screen version of Dreamgirls, as the free-spirited blues singer Shug; and Danielle Brooks, the Juilliard-trained actress who plays Taystee on the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black" as the free-speaking Sofia, that I almost forget the story's main character is the much-put-upon Celie.

When the story opens, Celie is 14. Her mother has long died and the man she believes to be her father berates her as ugly and regularly beats and rapes her, giving her two children that he takes away as soon as they're born. Her one solace is the relationship she has with her younger sister Nettie but the father bargains Celie off to a nearby farmer and Nettie runs away when his incestuous attentions turn to her.

The new husband, whom Celie refers to only as "Mister," is just as bad, working her like an animal and sexually abusing her until Shug shows up and begins to encourage Celie to stand up for who she is and what she wants.

As is his want, Doyle has stripped the show down to its elements and this is a much simpler production than the original which opened in 2005. Marsha Norman has done her part by trimming almost 30 minutes from her book, including, thankfully, an unfortunate fantasy sequence in Africa that had me rolling my eyes when I saw it in the original. The size of the cast has also been downsized from 28 to 20.

And, in addition to directing, Doyle has taken on the duties of both choreographer (here called musical staging) and set design (a unit set, dominated by a wall of hanging chairs that the characters unhinge and rearrange in varying combinations to indicate different locations, reminiscent of the approach Susan Stroman used for The Scottsboro Boys.)  

This streamlining places all the weight on the music and the performances. And despite slashing the orchestra from 18 musicians in the original production to six in this one, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray's score still delivers a soul-satisfying mix of gospel, R& B and power ballads. 

And the cast is terrific from the smaller featured roles (Joaquina Kalukango as Nettie; Kyle Scatliffe as Sofia's henpecked husband Harpo) straight through to the big marquee names.

Hudson and Brooks, both making their Broadway debuts, don't let their fans down (click here to read an interview with Hudson). They look to be comfortable onstage and sing the hell out of the songs they've been given. Brooks is particularly winning—earthy, funny and, when needed to be, poignant—in the role that Oprah Winfrey played in Steven Spielberg's movie version of Walker's book. 

But it's Erivo as Celie who is truly sensational. Broadway favorite LaChanze won a Tony for her portrayal of Celie in the 2005 production and "American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino won big kudos when she stepped in as a replacement. But both women emphasized the wounded bird aspect of the character.

Erivo, by contrast, imbues the character with an innate grit that makes it clear how she could withstand so much maltreatment and yet emerge from it with such a strong sense of self (click here to read a profile of the actress).

Her Celie is helped by Shug's advice and by the example of her friend Sofia but you never doubt, from the glee in her eyes when she fetches Mister's father a glass of water and spits in it before serving it to him to the upthrust of her chin after being slapped, that the inner dignity is always there inside her. Which makes the celebration of its total emergence all the more sweet.

Plus Erivo can sing. When she finished her 11 o'clock anthem, "I'm Here," the audience at the performance I attended couldn't stop clapping. Really. People cried, cheered and stomped their feet for about two solid minutes.

A woman two seats away from me started waving her hands in the air like someone who had caught the spirit at a church revival. And, although we both tend to be far more guarded about showing our emotions in public, my niece Jennifer and I cheered right along with the rest of them.

Supporting the Troops with "Beyond Glory"

Souvenir shops have become almost as common as Playbills at Broadway and off-Broadway theaters. So much so that I actually know some people who have skipped the show that's playing and just run into the lobby to pick up a CD, a T-shirt, or a keychain. The Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre doesn't usually host that kind of goodie-bag show. And so as the audience filed out of the performance I attended of Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang's one-man tribute to men who have received the Medal of Honor, we found a young woman standing next to a pile of books simply stacked on the floor. "Buy the book on which the show is based," she called out. "Only $20 and signed by the author." Several men, some of them visibly wiping tears from their eyes, snapped up copies.

Broadway has begun playing the niche market game, targeting different shows to different audiences—Wicked and Legally Blonde for tween and teen girls, Spamalot for their big brothers, The Color Purple for black church ladies and Xanadu for camp-loving show queens—but there's been little aimed at the "Saving Private Ryan" set. In fact, there’s been little entertainment for them period. Even Clint Eastwood is making rueful war movies these days. After four years in Iraq, Americans are fed up with war. But even the most diehard opponents of the war in Iraq, determined not to repeat at least one mistake of the Vietnam War, bookend their harangues with statements of support for the troops. In that, Beyond Glory, which Lang adapted from the oral histories in journalist Larry Smith’s book of the same title, is a play of its time.

I hadn't planned to see it. I've never been a big fan of Lang's (he's always seemed to overpower his roles) and I'm tired of war talk too. But the reviews were so strong that curiosity got the best of me. And I'm glad it did. Director Robert Falls has crafted a production that is elegant in its simplicity. And Lang, in total control of how to best use his natural aggression, is superb. Aided only by assorted pieces of military uniforms that he pulls from an old trunk, he transforms himself into eight very different men, most of them ordinary joes, who showed extraordinary valor under extreme circumstances in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. His co-stars are the show's design team (including lighting designer Dan Covey, sound designer Cecil Averett, projection designer John Boesche, and original music composers Rober Kessler and Ethan Neuberg) each of whom has contributed work that is non-intrusive but powerfully effective.

There was none of the usual coughing and no restless moving in seats at the performance I attended. The only sound was grateful laughter during the 80-minute show's few humorous moments. The New York run, which ends on Aug. 19, is only the latest stop on a tour that has taken the show to American military bases around the world and the floor of the U.S. Congress. Lang has insisted in interviews that the show isn't making a political statement. But it is unabashedly patriotic. Only 3,463 medals have been given the nation's highest award for military service since Abraham Lincoln signed the law establishing the honor in 1861; just two have been granted to soldiers involved in the Iraq War. Beyond Glory honors all of those who are serving.

How Fantasia Deepens "The Color Purple"

Shortly after the country star Reba McEntire completely reinvigorated Annie Get Your Gun back in 2001, the Tony committee considered creating an award for replacements. They ended up not doing it. But if they had, Fantasia, the third season winner on TV’s "American Idol," would surely have won this year's for her knockout performance in The Color Purple. I knew she was good even before the critics started throwing roses at her because my husband K plays in the orchestra and came home impressed with the way she handled the musical numbers, or to say it as he did, "The girl can sing." She can also sell tickets. As the New York Post's Michael Riedel wrote this week (click here to read his article), the show has been pulling in about $1 million a week since Fantasia took over as its star and now has advance sales of almost $10 million.

I finally got around to seeing Fantasia myself this past week. It's been a long time since I've been in an audience so excited to be seeing a show. People actually dressed up as though it were a special occasion; I haven't seen this many men wearing ties since my friend Joy's black-tie wedding three summers ago. The audience was about 85% black, including two rows of elderly church ladies, resplendent in their bright Sunday hats and thankfully seated at the back so that no one had to look over them. I hadn't seen The Color Purple since its opening night in 2005. In many ways, it's better now. K says they continued to work on it after the opening and the storytelling seems smoother. I do miss some members of the original cast, particularly the three actors who played the church ladies who make up the show's Greek chorus; the new trio isn't quite as funny. But Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, who plays the sultry singer Shug Avery, is still there and still terrific, albeit a bit raunchier. And Alton Fitzgerald White makes a more nuanced Mister, the semi-villain of the show. But it's Fantasia who has transformed and, yes, deepened The Color Purple.

Fantasia doesn't have anywhere near the acting range that the Tony-winning LaChanze (the show seems to favor one-named leading ladies) had but what Fantasia has perfectly suits the role of Celie, the downtrodden black woman who has to endure a lifetime of rapes, beatings, overwork and, famously, being called ugly before she learns to stand up for and love herself. As she recounts in her memoir, "Life Is Not a Fairy Tale," Fantasia, who turns 23 on June 30, was also a rape victim, dropped out of high school and became an unwed mother at 17. An accomplished method actor couldn't have put those experiences to better use than she does. And all of it comes bursting out in Celie’s final aria, "I'm Here" (click here to see the version Fantasia performed on the Tonys). The white couple sitting next to me had seemed a little restless during the first act and I thought the husband, a guy who looked as though a Rangers' game would be more his natural habitat, might bolt during intermission. But at the end of that song, he sprang out of his seat to lead the standing ovation. I teared up too.

Before the show and during the intermission, the ushers walked the aisles cautioning people that photographs were not permitted but at the curtain call a blaze of flashes greeted Fantasia. She grinned, looking happy and genuinely grateful. She blew kisses up to the cheering folks in the cheap seats, where just a few years ago she might have been sitting. I walked around to the stage door to meet K. “So, what did you think?” he asked. “You’re right,” I told him. “The girl can sing.”