The Color Purple
Opening Night: December 10, 2015
Closing: January 8, 2017
Theater: Bernard B. Jacobs
An unforgettable story of enduring love and triumph over adversity, “The Color Purple” is a landmark musical from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Alice Walker. This stirring family chronicle follows the inspirational Celie, as she journeys from childhood through joy and despair, anguish and hope to discover the power of love and life.
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December 10, 2015
Give thanks this morning, children of Broadway, and throw in a hearty hallelujah. “The Color Purple” has been born again, and its conversion is a glory to behold. The heart-clutching, gospel-flavored musical that opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on Thursday night — in a production led by an incandescent new star named Cynthia Erivo and, in her Broadway debut, an enchanting Jennifer Hudson — share a title, the same characters, the same source of inspiration (Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) and most of the same songs with “The Color Purple” seen on Broadway a decade ago. But, oh, what a difference there is between them. That earlier “Color Purple,” a box-office hit, was a big, gaudy, lumbering creature that felt oversold and overdressed. The current version is a slim, fleet-footed beauty, simply attired and beguilingly modest. Don’t be deceived, though, by its air of humility. There’s a deep wealth of power within its restraint.
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December 10, 2015
Here is one of the great triumphal surprises in a Broadway season that has had its share of them: A revival of “The Color Purple” that lifts an already formidable musical into greatness just seven years after its initial run closed. Propelled by a pair of knockout performances from Jennifer Hudson and Cynthia Erivo, both making their Broadway debuts, this transfer from London’s Menier Chocolate Factory takes a minimalist visual approach to a story that sprawls across decades and continents, training the focus firmly on the twists and turns of Alice Walker’s highly populated, Brontë-worthy tale of a Southern black girl who survives poverty, rape and deprivation before finding love and accomplishment in womanhood.
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December 10, 2015
The ladies wear the pants in John Doyle’s ravishing revival of “The Color Purple.” Jennifer Hudson is radiant as the love machine Shug Avery. Danielle Brooks shakes the house as the earthy Sofia. And Cynthia Erivo, the tiny pint of dynamite who originated the role at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, brings the audience roaring to its feet as Celie, the shamefully abused heroine of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker that started the whole book-to-film-to-stage phenomenon. All three performers are making their Broadway debuts, which makes it all the more thrilling.
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December 10, 2015
Wow, what a difference a more-focused production makes. When the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s searing story of abuse and deliverance, “The Color Purple,” premiered on Broadway in 2005, its rewards were compromised by the messy and emphatic qualities of the overblown production. Ten years later, director John Doyle and an electric cast assembled around transcendent British newcomer Cynthia Erivo as Celie have given the show a deep — and deeply satisfying — rethink. This revelatory overhaul is characterized by its grace, restraint and soaring spirituality, peeling back the clutter to expose the life-affirming material’s molten emotional core. It remakes a patchy musical as a thrilling one.
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December 10, 2015
Seeing “The Color Purple” on Broadway, a decade after its premiere, is like meeting an old friend who has gotten her life together since the last time you saw her. It seems more confident in itself, surer in its sexuality, and it’s lost a lot of weight; the cast of John Doyle’s revival and the theater in which it’s playing are 40 percent smaller than their 2005 equivalents. But the shrinking of this violet has not lessened its force. On the contrary, Doyle’s production intensifies “The Color Purple” and brings out its deeper hues. The musical blossoms into a classic.
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