The ‘Purple’ heart

EARLY on in the adaptation of “The Color Purple” to the Broadway musical stage, lead producer Scott Sanders gave the creative team a directive: “You guys have 10 to 12 minutes to tell all the sad stuff you want, but then get Sofia on that stage.”

Sofia, of course, is one of the self-empowered heroines of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The big-bosomed, no-nonsense force of nature blows into the life of Celie, who is burdened with the “sad stuff.” It is Celie who must endure a Job-like sentence of suffering in the novel set over four decades in an African American community in rural Georgia: poverty, rape, spousal abuse, apparent incest and forced separation from her offspring and beloved sister.

Sofia, meanwhile, provides a bracing dose of girl power -- even if that self-confidence eventually leads her into trouble. She spells relief, both comic and uplifting, to a producer like Sanders who worries a Broadway audience may be getting weary from all of Celie’s bad news.

From a commercial point of view, that may be all to the good. Broadway has been decidedly inhospitable to serious-minded musicals of late even as musical comedies have reasserted a strong hold on the box office, with such juggernauts as “The Producers” and “Spamalot.” Indeed, one would have to go back a decade, past numerous flops like “Titanic,” “The Life,” “Ragtime,” “Sideshow” and “The Wild Party,” to find the last darkly limned musicals to succeed at the box office -- “Rent” and “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk.”

As it is now, Sofia makes her entrance 25 minutes into the $10-million “Color Purple,” which opens at the Broadway Theatre on Thursday. But it’s some introduction: a long stage cross by Felicia P. Fields as Sofia, accompanied by a brassy blast of trumpets that awakens the dormant spirit in Celie, played by the actress LaChanze. That same fanfare has of late attended the production itself because of the involvement not only of Quincy Jones but also of Oprah Winfrey, who first garnered national fame and an Oscar nomination as Sofia in the 1985 Steven Spielberg film of “The Color Purple.”

Last month, Winfrey signed on as an investor, ponying up $1 million from her sizable fortune. But more important, the popular talk show host has above-the-title billing, as in “Oprah Winfrey Presents,” putting her prestige in the show’s promotional arsenal. On Nov. 11, after the cast of “The Color Purple” appeared on “Oprah,” the box office racked up an impressive $2 million in ticket sales.

Sanders says that Winfrey, apart from being the No. 1 cheerleader, has not involved herself creatively in the show with one exception. After a run-through, she suggested to Fields that the actress sustain for a couple of more counts the last note on her clarion call against spousal abuse titled, “Hell No!”

Sanders found the suggestion in sync with the tone and flavor of the piece as a whole. “You really need to look at the balance of uplifting to sad, troublesome to funny, abusive to sexy,” said Sanders, a onetime television, film and Radio City Music Hall executive who has nurtured the musical’s development over the last eight years. “It’s not been easy, and it’s been an incredibly challenging piece to adapt, this epic, important novel, but I think we’re finally getting there.”

Judging from an early preview, the audience appeared to approve of that balance. While Celie’s dire predicament is clear, there are scenes in “The Color Purple” that are more reminiscent of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the colorful and classic Fats Waller revue, than say, “Caroline, or Change,” the 2003 Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical that also featured an oppressed black woman angrily challenging God because of her victimization. For all its artistic integrity, “Caroline” received mixed reviews, was snubbed for the best musical Tony Award and closed at a total loss.

In the musical of “The Color Purple,” the brutality of Celie’s husband Mister is more than compensated for by the good-natured behavior of his son, Harpo. Shug Avery, the free-spirited songbird who liberates the sensualist in Celie, is as vibrant as her feathered hats. And even Sofia’s vicious encounter with institutionalized racism happens offstage, and is swiftly dispatched.

To sway an author

FOR his template for “The Color Purple,” Sanders reached back to the golden era of Broadway and musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof,” seeing parallels between the crisis of faith of Tevye, the beleaguered hero of “Fiddler,” and that of Celie. But it was through “Noise/Funk” rather than “Fiddler” that Sanders was able to persuade reluctant author Alice Walker to allow “Purple” to reach the musical stage.

Stung by the criticism meted out on the Spielberg film, particularly for its prettified settings, coy treatment of lesbianism and bleak portrayal of black men, the author was not keen on a new incarnation in a genre with which she was unfamiliar. As part of a full-court press to change Walker’s mind, Sanders arranged for a theatergoing trip to Manhattan for her.

“I had a really good time,” Walker recalled in a recent phone interview, adding that seeing “Noise/Funk” and “Rent” convinced her that musicals could handle heftier fare. “To tell the truth, I just liked Scott and decided to trust his good heart.”

Nor was she daunted that, given the high profile of her novel and the subsequent film (which grossed nearly $100 million domestically), that the characters would once again undergo microscopic critical evaluation. “I’ve lived long enough to know that criticisms leveled at whatever shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want to do,” she said with a laugh. “Many people read the book and just saw the horror and tragedy. I thought if Scott picked the right people, there’d be a chance to show the humor, resilience and spirited rise of a people who had been ground down, some of which was lost in the film.”

To set that tone, Sanders tapped Gary Griffin, a Chicago-based director famous for his efficient revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals; the African American choreographer Donald Byrd; and the pop music team of Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. To write the book for the musical, he turned to Marsha Norman after Regina Taylor dropped out due to what was termed “scheduling conflicts.” The choice of Norman, who won a Pulitzer for “ ‘night Mother,” a downbeat drama about a suicidal daughter and her prattling mother, seemed to signal a dicier approach to Celie’s story. But Sanders says he thought Norman’s earthy wit and Southern background would make a good fit with “Purple.” She was also batting .500 with musicals, having written the long-running “The Secret Garden” and the flop “The Red Shoes,” based on the classic film.

In a phone conversation, Norman bristled at the mention of the producer’s directive to get Sofia on the stage in “10 to 12 minutes,” dismissing it as a “commercial sound bite.” “We didn’t take it in any literal way,” she recalls. “What I heard was that the audience is going to be happier when Sofia gets there. But I knew that if we didn’t set up the stakes for Celie, covering 10 years of her life, from 14 to 24, during which she loses her babies, her sister Nettie, and lands in a bad marriage to Mister, then it didn’t matter whether Sofia ever got there or not.” That said, she added, “We all saw Celie’s story not as one of oppression but one of triumph. It’s a march to joy, not a parade to defeat.”

Both Sanders and director Griffin felt, however, that audience expectations would determine in part how that march to joy should be calibrated emotionally. In fact, the producer invited Griffin to sit in on the focus groups he had commissioned to help strategize the marketing of the show.

The director said he would leave it to others to judge whether his participation in such groups may have caused him to sand down the rougher edges of the story for commercial considerations. But he maintains that they were “very helpful to me as a director. From what they remembered of the movie, a lot of them said they thought it would be dark or depressing. But we knew there was a lot of guts and humor as well, and that we had to clue the audience in on that as early as possible.”

Even earlier than the arrival of Sofia, as it turned out. During the fall of 2004, the musical had a tryout engagement at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, a run that received mixed critical response but broke box-office records and garnered the approval of Walker, who attended the opening night with 30 friends. That production had opened with the funeral of Celie and Nettie’s mother, which was considered the wrong cue. Now the show starts with a brighter opening in which the ensemble -- beautifully dressed and just plain beautiful -- sings of the “Mysterious Ways” of God during a church service. It signals to the audience that they’re not in for a depressing time, says Griffin, “and that they are entering a world in which people sing their souls, their sorrows and their joys. And they move and dance in this church.”

It is also a world in which an oppressed -- and oppressing -- black man can grow and evolve into a New Man. Both Norman and Griffin said that early meetings between Walker and the creative team yielded the idea that it was important to show the metamorphosis of Mister over the course of the musical. That change is largely inspired by his son, Harpo, a character based on Walker’s father, who rejected the patriarchal notions of manhood passed down by his own father to express a nurturing gentle side. “It was gender-role reversal in my family,” said Walker, “so Harpo is finding that balance in himself between the feminine and the masculine.” Asked if she saw the musical as an opportunity to redress what some critics saw as the film’s disparaging treatment of black men, Walker said with some exasperation, “I always felt that the criticism was so extremely dishonest that I resolved not to respond about it ever again.”

Engaging the audience

NORMAN, for her part, did avail herself to explore the New Man in Walker’s book. “What we wanted to do was look at the men in the piece in a fuller, more modern way,” she said. “A lot has happened since the book was written and the story of Harpo had yet to be told. Because he’s so full of light, he brings light to the piece.”

Indeed, one of the musical’s most entertaining moments is a sassy, drenched-in-sexual-innuendo number, “Is There Anything I Can Do for You?” in which Sofia and Harpo meet on the playing field as equals. At a recent preview, it brought down the house, inspiring vocal responses from a highly engaged audience. The scene was key in the musical, Norman said, not because she consciously set out to provide the audience with fun but because otherwise it “looks as though sex is nothing but trouble that creates havoc in people’s lives.

“Sofia and Harpo are people who are crazy about each other and who get it right in terms of love and sex,” she adds. “I wanted to be able to show that incredibly powerful and positive force in these lives.”

The same healing power is on display in Celie’s sexual awakening through Shug’s practiced ministrations. Downplayed in the movie, the lesbian attraction is expressed tastefully in a dimly lit bathtub scene and accompanied by the show’s romantic ballad, “What About Love?” “It was something that we all talked about a lot but were committed to,” says Griffin. “It’s about Celie finding love and caring for the first time and the fact that it is a woman is secondary to the wonder and happiness of discovering that sexual passion.”

With its emphasis on the healing nature of Celie’s story, however, the show runs the risk of being tarred with the same criticism directed at the Spielberg film -- that it glosses over what was in reality a somewhat grim existence. Although Griffin concedes that the show is content to remain happily rooted in the era before Sondheim came along with his dark tales of cannibalism, assassins and dangerously obsessive love, he says, “ ‘Fiddler,’ ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Carousel’ also dealt with very scary things [pogroms, child abuse, wife beating]. Still, they also celebrated tenacity and affirmation in the face of it. Celie’s story just seemed to fold into that perfectly.

“Celie has great integrity, she never compromises her anger and questions about why God allows so much pain in the world. But one of the tools of her survival is her imagination. And the musical theater, by its nature, allows her and us to locate that poetic world, that heightened feeling that allows us to rise above the hardscrabble reality.”