Big, Broad, Lavish Musical of The Color Purple Lumbers Off Broadway

Before he finally committed to the genre with West Side Story, Steven Spielberg flirted with making a musical a number of times, including his film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. That film wound up with strong musical elements, including a score from producer Quincy Jones, but was primarily a straight drama with compromises more notable – the softening of a lesbian relationship; the telling of a Black woman’s story by a white male director – than its lack of production numbers. Still, the movie did often feel as if it was crying out for bigger, more expressive emotions, to overwhelm or replace the broader moments that Spielberg sometimes fumbled. So when Jones produced a Broadway musical adaptation in 2005, it felt like a natural progression – and so, too, does the Broadway play’s re-adaptation back into film, this time directed by Blitz Bazawule, a Ghanaian filmmaker who previously worked on Black Is King with Beyoncé.

Returning to her Broadway role, Fantasia Barrino plays Celie, the film’s heroine, who struggles through decades of Southern American life in the first half of the 20th century. The movie begins with Celie as a teenage girl (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) who has been repeatedly raped by her monstrous father figure Alfonso (Deon Cole), following the death of her mother. After this abuse results in two pregnancies and subsequent babies Celie is cruelly forced to give up, Alfonso essentially sells her off to Mister (Colman Domingo), a successful farmer who also abuses her, only reinforcing Celie’s quiet feelings of low self-worth. Celie’s sister Nettie (Halle Bailey, then later the singer Ciara) is spunkier and less meek, a lifeline for Celie, but the two are separated early in life, by circumstances that start off tragic only to wind up sort of extraordinary. In Nettie’s absence, Celie’s journey is influenced by other women who pass through her life, including her boisterous friend Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and the brassy singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson). Gradually, Celie comes to realize her own resilience and power, even if it doesn’t always look exactly like Nettie’s, Sofia’s or Shug’s.

Bazawule doesn’t shy away from the sexual relationship between Celie and Shug (who also captivates Mister, arriving in Celie’s life as the houseguest mistress with a previous on-and-off relationship to her husband). Spielberg did, in hope of keeping things PG-13 back in 1985 (and, most likely, also out of his career-long discomfort with sex). This Color Purple is allowed to be a bit bawdier, more explicit (and still, as it happens, within the confines of a PG-13 in 2023). The humor, too, springing from the story’s darker corners, tends toward triumphant release, rather than the clumsily executed slapstick Spielberg sometimes nervously fiddled around with. Sofia in particular – though memorably played by Oprah Winfrey in the earlier film – emerges from Brooks’ performance as a cathartically crowdpleasing figure, aided by the ability to actually burst into a song like “Hell No,” which in turn makes her story’s tragic turn sting all the more.

And yet despite the would-be showstoppers on call, there’s still something strained and even a little sweaty about The Color Purple. Bazawule directs musical numbers unnervingly like the crop of filmmakers who took on stage-to-film adaptations around the time The Color Purple itself was wowing Broadway audiences, meaning his camera maintains an antsy fixation on capturing spectacle rather than making memorable images. There are some that emerge anyway, to be sure: During one song, a besotted Celie imagines a bathtub-bound Shug in the center of a giant spinning record atop a gramophone, while Celie herself circles her. Later, another number is performed on a fantasy art-deco film set, starting in black-and-white before shifting to color. Even in these moments of visual invention, though, Bazawule is pulling a Rob Marshall, using fantasy as a kind of hybrid gimmick and excuse, a compromise between razzle-dazzle and respectability.