Gaining Voices and Losing Inhibitions
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — In one of this summer’s most surprising marriages, John Doyle has made an honest musical out of “The Color Purple.” This minimalist director’s take on the stage adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel, which opened on Monday night at the Menier Chocolate Factory here, is so lithe and muscular that at first it’s hard to detect even remnants of the big, bloated show that “The Color Purple” once was. “Wait a minute, have I really seen this before?” I thought to myself, about 20 minutes into the production, and at intermission, I checked the program credits to make sure. Yep, this was still “The Color Purple,” with a book by Marsha Norman and songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, the creators of the 2005 hit Broadway production. In the second act, once all those thundering reversals and revelations and anthems of self-respect came rolling in, I realized that there was no mistake. This was indeed “The Color Purple” I had not lost my heart to eight years ago. But by then I had spent enough time with Mr. Doyle’s production and its seductive cast to forgive far greater sins than a few feel-good clichés. This was a second date made in heaven. During the last couple of decades, the Scottish-born Mr. Doyle has emerged as the ultimate diet guru for hefty musicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Best known for stripped-down revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals (including “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, and a recent “Passion” at the Classic Stage Company in New York), he has used the same paradoxical aesthetic with remarkable success. Mr. Doyle, to put it simply, makes shows smaller to demonstrate how truly big they are. All flashy excesses of set and costume are pared away, and for a long time his trademark was having his cast function as its own orchestra (a device he does not employ for “Purple”). But the principle at work has always been the same: Let the characters own their stories by putting the power of narrative as directly as possible into the hands of the singers portraying them. This approach seems especially suitable for “The Color Purple.” The 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on which the musical is based charts a powerless Southern black woman’s discovering the power within her over several decades of the early 20th century. Ms. Walker has said that she was inspired to write the novel by memories of her grandparents and the stories they told or that she heard about them. Much of the book is epistolary, and part of its charm comes from the reader’s being urged to make that empathetic leap into the minds of letter writers from another time. The novel makes us experience something of what happens when we pore over old family photo albums and imagine the full, fluid world behind the frozen images. The look of the Menier production, which features a set by Mr. Doyle, with costumes by Matthew Wright and lighting by Jane Cox, has both the precision and haziness of such photographs. The palette is largely sepia tones. I don’t recall seeing a flash of purple at any time, though I believed in the revelatory existence of that hue more than I ever did watching Steven Spielberg’s color-saturated film adaptation of 1985. The Menier stage is a weathered, clean-scrubbed wooden-plank floor. Straight-back chairs hang on pegs on the rear wall, to be taken down when the scene demands them. The cast arrives in formal, slightly stiff groupings. (Ann Yee is the subtle, elegant choreographer.) Then the music melts them, and the story starts to flow, unstoppable. It’s a plot-packed tale, in which people can grow up, have children, lose them, move to foreign lands, be assaulted and raped and nearly murdered — all within the twinkling of a couple of songs. But this production makes it clear that what we’re hearing is a story, told with both urgency and lyrical affection, in which what’s remembered acquires mythic status. A trio of gossiping women show up to fill us in on the background and latest developments in the life of Celie (the wonderful Cynthia Erivo), a girl who is sold into marriage at 14 after having borne two children by the man she believes is her father. At the same time, though, we see people through the guarded, watchful eyes of Ms. Erivo’s Celie, a child woman of exceeding gravity and obedience, who is told repeatedly that she is doomed to a bleak future because she is black, female and ugly. The passivity of Celie makes her an unlikely protagonist in a musical, where stars are expected to shine and flicker blindingly. But because the Menier (the cradle of acclaimed West End and Broadway revivals of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “La Cage aux Folles”) is such a small space, Ms. Erivo can be as quiet and monotonal as her part demands. She’s often seated on the edge of the stage as an absorbent witness to the more vibrant lives of others: her abusive husband, Mister (Christopher Colquhoun); his flamboyant mistress, Shug Avery (Nicola Hughes), from whom Celie learns what love is; Mister’s sweet-tempered son Harpo (Adebayo Bolaji) and his fierce, outspoken wife, Sofia (Sophia Nomvete); and the beloved sister, Nettie (Abiona Omonua), from whom Celie is separated early. As the existences of these people collide, intertwine and unravel, the score — performed with an eight-member band under the direction of Tom Deering — never sleeps. (Catherine Jayes is the musical supervisor.) The gospel, honky-tonk and folk elements come to the surface plainer and prettier than they did with Broadway orchestrations. The use of a cappella harmonies is exquisite, as is the gradual emergence of Celie’s individual voice. In his masterpiece, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” August Wilson wrote that the essential quest for African-Americans in the years after slavery was to find their own individual songs. And one of the particular joys of this “Color Purple” is hearing Ms. Erivo’s Celie learn to sing. By the end, she’s perfectly capable of delivering an all-out showstopper. But she had to earn the right to do so. Across town the repressed title character of another show (which opened the same night as “Purple”) is also finding her song, a process woven into one gleeful hell of a shaggy dog story. I use the word hell here advisedly. “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart,” a National Theater of Scotland production which I caught at the London Welsh Center near King’s Cross Station, is about a dance with the Devil. Or rather an eternal chin wag with the Devil. Prudencia (Melody Grove) is an inhibited academic who specializes in Scottish ballads and finds herself inhabiting the fantastical world of one of them on a snow-filled night in a godforsaken border town. She is spirited away to the library of her dreams, only to learn that she has been abducted by Old Scratch himself (played by two actors here, since the Devil is a mutable soul). Written by David Greig (redeeming himself for his participation in the megamusical “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), and directed by Wils Wilson, “Prudencia” is staged in a pub through which the five-member ensemble of actors-cum-musicians dance, sing, cuddle up to the audience and recite Prudencia’s tale in happy-go-lucky rhyme. Previously performed in bars and clubs throughout the world (including the United States), this gleeful show is, like “Purple,” a celebration of the storytelling impulse. Needless to say, its modes and moods are somewhat giddier, but “Prudencia” makes its own irresistible argument for the importance of finding a ballad to call your own. This is true even if, as in Prudencia’s case, it happens to come — with a whole lot of la-la-las — from the Australian pop goddess Kylie Minogue. |