Did Atlanta Critics Praise The Color Purple?
Here is a sampling of what they had to say:
Chris Jones of Variety: "It feels like the production team behind this straight-ahead, modestly scaled new musical version at Atlanta's Alliance Theater was desperately careful not to run from author Alice Walker's intensely personal characters, her acute sense of the spirals of social injustice and her simple argument that, at the end of the day, we all wake up with only ourselves to blame or, preferably, to love. The result is a solid, capably executed piece of musical theater -- already a hit in Atlanta -- that carefully plots Celie's terrible life journey with dignity and integrity, making it deserving of its future berth on Broadway. Gary Griffin's direction is smart and well-paced. And the show is careful to reflect its beloved source -- expressed in the form of letters in the characters' own unpolished language -- with great fealty to its themes. But Walker also is an incomparable poet. And Spielberg knows a thing or two about an epic catharsis. It's time for this well-meaning but overly prosaic show to heed both of them. What's missing from The Color Purple in this first Alliance incarnation is a sense of the sweeping poetic scale demanded by both the material and the form."
Wendell Brock of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Getting its world premiere Friday night at the Alliance Theatre, the Broadway-bound Color Purple is a visually mesmerizing, vocally soaring gospel-jazz-and-blues pastiche that honors the shape of Walker's epistolary text. As far as new musicals go, this one is well on its way to success, thanks to a lovely, heartfelt score by Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray and Allee Willis. But there are problems, too. As written by book writer Marsha Norman, the musical suffers from the absurdities of a convoluted plot and tonal ambiguities that lurch from darkness to light without cohesion. The passage set in Africa feels superfluous and unnecessary, as if the writers are stretching for their Lion King moment, while a telephone conversation in which Celie zips through some of the key plot twists feels hasty and contrived."
Nick Marino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Going into Friday night's Alliance Theatre world premiere of The Color Purple, one of the major question marks was the music that would drive the production. After all, the songwriters had never before written for musical theater. To their credits were the pop megaballad 'Get Here' by Brenda Russell, the irritatingly catchy theme song from 'Friends,' Allee Willis and Madonna's 'Express Yourself' and 'Into the Groove' Stephen Bray. Fine for what they are, all of them. But not exactly nuanced. The production suffers from that same flaw--too many songs have only one dimension. It's also a wildly, confusingly eclectic production, at times inducing musical whiplash. Fortunately, the sheer breadth of the production--with a whopping 30-song score including reprises--gives the writers chance after chance to demonstrate emotional and stylistic range in the aggregate, and to hit on a handful of memorable songs that carry the lesser ones. The best music is the closest to the African and African-American tradition."