Great musicals are always based on a conflict of two worlds. “The Color Purple” is no different. Here, the conflict is between men and women.
So said Pulitzer-Prize winner Marsha Norman, who adapted Alice Walker’s story for this Tony-nominated musical opening Tuesday at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle.
“ ’The Color Purple’ is also a love story. The love between sisters, the love of family and home and, in the end, the love Celie has found for herself,” Norman said.
“It’s so profound. At the end of the show, the whole audience just cheers for her and we feel it and it’s pouring out of her.”
Seattle is hosting the first North American touring production of “The Color Purple,” which is based on Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the film by Steven Spielberg. The story focuses on Celie, a woman living in the South who finds the strength to triumph over adversity. The play features a score of gospel, jazz, pop and the blues with music and lyrics by Grammy Award-winning composers and lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray.
Much of that score, about 15 songs, was penned before writer Norman got on board the production. Her job as librettist was to create the words or “little book” that would be spoken in between the songs.
Norman, in a phone interview from New York, said it wasn’t too much of a challenge coming up with dialogue because the songs had “great soul.”
“The rule in musicals is you sing the things you can’t say, and say the things you can’t sing, those are the big love songs where you soak in the emotion of the moment,” Norman said. “You don’t want anyone standing there on stage talking on and on about how they love someone, but you’ll listen to a song about that love as long as it takes.”
In the book, Celie takes mostly a passive role. So the challenge in the adaptation was to give Celie a more active role so the audience could root for her. The second message that needed delivering was the big love story between Celie and her sister Nettie, who spends lots of time off center stage because she leaves Celie, Norman said.
“So we have to convey what that loss has meant,” Norman said. “In the music you have to make the audience feel the right stuff at the right time; clearly that’s a matter of craft, you’ve got to make that happen.”
Norman does well at her craft. She won the Pulitzer for her play “‘Night, Mother” and a Tony Award for her book of the Broadway musical “The Secret Garden.” She is co-chair, with Christopher Durang, of the playwriting department of the Juilliard School.
Norman said she changed the treatment the men received in the book. She said she really needed Celie’s husband, “Mr.,” to redeem himself. Norman said she didn’t feel a need to be tied to the way men were in 1983. The result was surprising to Norman.
“There are men sitting in the audience and they’re all crying because of the identification the men had of their mothers,” Norman said. “I didn’t plan that but that’s what happened.”
Changes as well as cuts from the book had to be made. One such cut was the part in the book where Celie is shaving Mr. In the book, nothing happens and rage is expressed through Walker’s words.
“In theater, you don’t want to watch something not happen. … If you’ve got a person with a razor blade they’ve got to use it,” Norman said. “So what we were able to do was find a song that exposes that rage and hostility.
“That’s how you work with a big adaptation like this, finding what the correct translation is. We say you can’t cut up a sofa to make a chair; you have to figure out what you’ve got to make a chair out of it, you find the things that work best on the stage.”
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