Music in 'The Color Purple' delivers soul, jazz and blues

Music in 'The Color Purple' delivers soul, jazz and blues
November 5, 2010
Katherine Allen
Arizona Daily Star

The Color Purple" may leave you black and blue.
The rousing musical, which opened to a crowd of about 1,600 at the Tucson Music Hall Tuesday, is truer to the Alice Walker novel than the movie was. Still, it speeds through 30 years so quickly that whiplash is likely.
And those 30 years are packed with abuse - sexual, psychological, physical. It is also thick with loss, anger, birth, near-death, poverty and sexism. It's a whole lot to pour into a close-to-three-hour musical.
That means that transitions are too hasty to be believable - from hate to love; hardness to tenderness; blame to forgiveness - all within nanoseconds.
But, ultimately, those are what this story is about - mostly love and forgiveness - and if it's a little choppy getting there, so what? Getting there is what's important.
The journey is filled with a whole lot of foot-stompin', hand-clappin' music that weaves from soul to jazz to blues and back again.
The story is of young Celie, who is poor, black and the mother of two by the time she is 14, courtesy of the man she thinks is her father.
He gives the children away and gives Celie away to a man who beats her and berates her and demands that she care for him and his four children.
Celie triumphs in the end, but, brother, it sure ain't easy gettin' there.
The cast is led by Dayna Jarae Dantzler as Celie. She opens the production playing a 14-year-old Celie who is about to give birth to her second child, and ends it as a 44-year-old woman with graying hair and a life she loves.
Dantzler has a strong voice, and she delivered soft ballads and big belters with finesse. But it was her acting chops that allowed her to take Celie on a journey that the audience could embrace.
There were the usual sound issues in the Tucson Music Hall, and sometimes the orchestra and the voices seemed to be fighting for attention. Which means lyrics got lost.
Still, this is a cast that wiggled into its characters.
Pam Trotter as the hefty Sofia, the woman who don't take no abuse from no one, has a fine comedic sense. Her "Hell! No!" song often brings spontaneous cheers from audiences with each verse. Here, the sound swallowed most of the lyrics, slowing the response. Lyrics such as:
Girl child ain't safe in a family of mens!
Sick and tired how a woman still live like a slave.
Oh, you better learn how to fight back
While you still alive!
You show them, girl, and beat back that jive!
'Cause when a man jus' don't give a damn. . . . Hell no!
Hell no!!
The words may not have been completely clear, but the audience got the gist. By the end of the song, the group of women on stage stood together in solidarity against abuse, and with the last "hell, no!" the cheering came.
Other cast members helped realize the story as they raced through it, including Traci Allen as Celie's sister, Nettie; Edward C. Smith as Mister, Celie's cruel husband; and Taprena Augustine as the sultry Shug, the object of affection for both Celie and her husband.
This production was directed by Gary Griffin, who also directed the Broadway production. The biggest difference here is the level of acting - this is a non-Equity production (Equity is the union for professional actors), which means these are younger, less-experienced actors.
But they are actors who know their stuff and can take a complex and dark tale like "The Color Purple" and turn it into a story that catches the heart.