When The Color Purple premiered on Broadway in 2005, New York Times critic Ben Brantley complained that the stage musical based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was overstuffed—that it tried too hard to do too much too fast, and suffered as a result. “Watching this beat-the-clock production summons the frustrations of riding through a picturesque stretch of country in a supertrain,” Brantley wrote. “The landscape looks seductively lush and varied; the local populace seems lively and inviting. . . . But it all passes by in a watercolor blur.”
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Though he’s working with constricted square footage by Broadway standards, the Mercury’s L. Walter Stearns doesn’t hold back on book or score, scope or time, comedy or tragedy, dancing or singing—or on Frances Maggio’s progressively wilder costumes, for that matter. For better and for worse, Stearns’s directorial approach is epitomized by one of Walker’s characters, Sofia: a big, lush, confident lady built for comfort, not for speed.
Sofia figures into the story as a sometime daughter-in-law of Celie, the innately generous soul at its center. During the long first act of The Color Purple, Celie undergoes the trials of a female Job. As if growing up poor and black in the Jim Crow south during the first decades of the 20th century weren’t bad enough in itself, she’s raped on a regular basis by her stepfather—a man ironically known as “Pa”—giving birth twice by the time she’s 14 years old. Pa takes both babies away from Celie, telling her only that he’s getting “rid” of them. The single light in her life is her sister, Nettie, whose beauty and intelligence seem to immunize her from Pa’s violence. When a similarly vicious farmer called Mister comes to court Nettie, Pa rebuffs him and offers Celie instead. Mister takes the deal, reasoning that though Celie may be ugly, she can be made to work. Unrelentingly. And so begins another horrific chapter in Celie’s life. Her frequent prayers to God get more and more combative as time goes on.
Through 10/27: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport 773-325-1700mercurytheaterchicago.com $22-$59
