Living Color
Entrusting a big Broadway musical — especially one based on a beloved American novel — to three songwriters who had no previous experience with this particularly tricky art form can only be considered an act of faith. When you add in the fact that Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell, and Allee Willis had never before worked together, it might seem a miracle that the show in question turned out to be musically successful. Then again, faith and miracles are among the subjects of The Color Purple.
What’s immediately striking about the show’s original cast recording (Angel/EMI), set for release on January 24, is that the score shows no signs of being crafted by committee; there’s no sense that perhaps Russell composed X, Bray composed Y, and Willis composed Z. These songs traverse genres with relative ease, skipping from blues to pop to gospel to more tradtional show music and back again. If you don’t find yourself snapping your fingers to the girl-group-like “Miss Celie’s Pants,” shaking your booty to Shug’s showstopper “Push Da Button,” or smiling broadly when you hear the charming “Any Little Thing,” then you need to take some Prozac now!
The trio is also more than capable of writing a heartfelt ballad; e.g., “Too Beautiful for Words,” Shug’s declaration of love to Celie, and the pair’s searing duet “What About Love?”, which should get considerable airplay in a special version recorded by Patti LaBelle and Jill Scott. Unlike most of the show’s other numbers, these songs have lyrics that will allow them to be performed in various contexts. The score’s crowning achievement is the gospel-inflected title tune, which beseeches us to reevaluate and appreciate the world around us.
The recording also makes it clear that a more experienced group of composers might have made some different, more fortuitous choices in musicalizing this story. The show’s disjointed opening number fails to properly set the mood because too much is going on; it starts with some childish sing-song from the young Celie and her sister Nettie (“Huckleberry Pie”) before breaking into a gospel number (“Mysterious Ways”) that is then interrupted by exposition and dialogue. Many of the other songs in the first act share a similar fate, being forced to give way to dialogue that ruins their flow.
There are also some missteps in Act II, but they’re not as severe and, one suspects, aren’t entirely the songwriters’ fault. Mister’s “transformation” number, “Miss Celie’s Curse” is rather dull and doesn’t manage to convince us that this devil-man has honestly learned the errors of his ways. Also, Celie’s 11-o-clock number, “I’m Here,” proves to be serviceable rather than exhilirating. But the show’s star, the glorious LaChanze, gives all she’s got to that song and everything else she sings, including the plaintive “Lily of the Field.” Her pain when Nettie is taken from her is palpable. So is the ferocity of Felicia P. Fields’ Sofia, the sheer sensuality of Elisabeth Withers-Mendes’ Shug, and the goodness of Renée Elise Goldsberry’s Nettie (even though she only gets a chance to shine in the “African Homeland” sequence).
The score sounds particularly lush on the CD, thanks in part to 11 additional players in the orchestra’s string section. Unfortunately, the lyrics are occasionally unintelligble — and Angel has chosen not to print them in the booklet, which is a shame. (They’re reportedly available online at www.angelrecords.com, but I couldn’t find them.). Still, all in all, the cast album of The Color Purple is a reason to rejoice.
