The Color Purple: Shades of Mediocrity

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the National Tour of The Color Purple at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The highly-promoted tour stars Fantasia (who, from the title page of the program no longer needs her last name, Barino). Even though Fantasia gave a really solid performance that night, it’s taken me a while to write about the show. Honestly, it’s taken me a while to dissect my feelings about it.

To be fair, The Color Purple is not a bad musical—it’s perfectly fine. But in many ways, I think that mediocrity is the show’s downfall.

In the mid 80s, when I was in college at an arts conservatory in North Carolina, just down the road the legendary Stephen Spielberg was filming the screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s masterpiece, The Color Purple. This was particularly important because it meant an opportunity for art school students to appear in the Spielberg film as an extra. There was tremendous buzz on campus, and several of my friends and classmates ended up surviving the editing room floor and are forever immortalized in the film that made Whoopi and Oprah household names. The daily cafeteria chatter was the kind that defines film legends, “Yesterday, Spielberg stopped production for six hours waiting for the perfect cloud formation.”

Who knows whether or not the stories grew over time or even ever happened, but the thought that they might be true made Spielberg a genius in our minds. And the film version of The Color Purple did not disappoint. The film is lush, sweeping, touching, and beautiful. John Williams’ score mapped perfectly to every scene, giving real emotion and desperation to the characters and the setting.

This brings me back to the stage musical version of the same name. The Color Purple, the musical, is not lush and at times is not even melodic. The score is more forgettable and the book is a forced compilation of iconic moments, each reminding us of the same moment in the film. Every memorable line from the movie is here, but the context that strings these moments together is missing.

The worst offense is at the beginning of Act II with the representation of Africa. The scene looks like a moment designed to mock The Lion King—when the dead antelope is carried out, it looks like a Forbidden Broadway parody of The Circle of Life.

As I said, The Color Purple is not a bad show. But it should have been an amazing show. It should have been beautiful and touching. It should have captivated its audience and left not a dry eye in the house. It just didn’t.

I think the thing that disappoints me the most, is that The Color Purple is a marketing gift—with Oprah’s endorsement, the familiarity of the film, and Alice Walker’s powerful story, this show is packing in crowds of people who almost never go to the theatre. Here is an opportunity to introduce non-theatre goers to the magic of the stage—to get them hooked and coming back again and again. Rather than leverage this powerful property by producing a brilliant theatrical event, this audience is deceived into thinking that The Color Purple is theatrical genius. Everyone raves, and Oprah said that it’s good—therefore, it must be. The opportunity to educate, to inspire, and to introduce magic has been wasted.

I had a teacher at that North Carolina arts school who used to say, “There is no room in the arts for mediocrity.” Clearly, she hadn’t yet seen The Color Purple.