THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Tuesday, March 17, 2015
FROM: Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Faith Maciolek
PAGES: 6, including this page.
March 17, 2015
‘Color Purple’ Revival Names Its Celie and Shug
By Michael Paulson
A stripped-down production of “The Color Purple,” the musical adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, will feature an up-and-coming British theater star and an Academy Award-winning American actress when it opens on Broadway this fall.
The British actress, Cynthia Erivo, will reprise her performance as Celie, the show’s much-abused heroine, which she created in a 2013 production in London. And Jennifer Hudson, an “American Idol” alumna who won an Oscar for her performance in “Dreamgirls,” will join the production as Shug Avery, Celie’s rival-friend- mentor-lover. Both women are making their Broadway debuts.
The revival of “The Color Purple” that they will lead is being directed by John Doyle, who is known for his minimalist approach to musical theater. The first staging of his production, at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, won over skeptical critics. Ben Brantley, in The New York Times, called it “so lithe and muscular that at first it’s hard to detect even remnants of the big, bloated show that ‘The Color Purple’ once was.”
“The Color Purple” was released in 1982 to great acclaim. In addition to the Pulitzer, its author, Alice Walker, won a National Book Award for the work, which depicts the race-and-gender-related struggles of a group of black women living in rural Georgia in the 1930s. In 1985, the book was adapted into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.
The original musical adaptation, with a book by Marsha Norman, songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, and a vocal champion in Ms. Winfrey, opened on Broadway in 2005; reviews were lukewarm, but LaChanze, who played Celie, won a Tony for her performance, and her replacement in the role, Fantasia, was much-praised. The musical made a profit, unlike most Broadway shows, running for 910 performances, and succeeded in attracting an unusually high number of black theatergoers.
The revival is shorter and simpler than the original. “Nothing was rewritten, but things were cut and restructured,” Mr. Doyle said recently. “There aren’t as many big dance numbers, but it gets to the heart of things very well.” That heart, he said, “is a story about how women were treated in a certain environment at a certain time, about what love really is, and about how a person becomes empowered in an environment where they have no power, and how much courage does that journey take.”
The Broadway revival, with Ms. Winfrey among its producers, is scheduled to begin performances in November at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and to open on Dec. 3.
Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000
“I’m completely over the moon,” Ms. Erivo said by phone from London. “Part of me is still in disbelief, and the other part of me is completely ready for the challenge, and another part is bubbling over for joy.”
March 17, 2015
Review: ‘Placebo,’ With Carrie Coon, Opens at Playwrights Horizons By Charles Isherwood
Pliny the Elder — naturalist, philosopher, warrior and all-around sage of the early Roman Empire — plays an unlikely role in “Placebo,” the new play by Melissa James Gibson that opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons.
Classicists, don’t get too hot and bothered. Pliny doesn’t actually appear as a character in Ms. Gibson’s slight but divertingly offbeat comedy-drama. But he’s the subject of a dissertation being valiantly struggled over by one member of the couple at the center of this play. Their conversations return to this fascinating figure with a regularity that makes you feel he’s almost a presence onstage. Who knew he died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, racing toward the calamity out of unquenchable curiosity while others were fleeing for their lives? (Well, classics scholars, I suppose.)
Drawing closer in the break room as things back home grow shakier: Carrie Coon and Alex Hurt as medical colleagues in Melissa James Gibson’s play “Placebo,” at Playwrights Horizons. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Louise, a doctoral candidate who works at a hospital assisting in a trial of a new drug to improve women’s sexual arousal, tries to keep those cigs out of reach, for the obvious reason (death-causing, and all that). Her mother has, at 58, recently been sent home from the hospital on a respirator. The prognosis is grim.
The persistence of feelings of inadequacy is a subterranean theme in the play, the latest from the gifted writer of “This,” seen at the same theater. Mary (Florencia Lozano), one of the patients in the double-blind trial Louise is working on, has lost her sex drive completely and feels she’s lost her identity along with it. Louise, though she seems businesslike and confident at work and nurturing at home, clearly has her own insecurities. She wears her lab coat virtually all the time because she feels it announces to the world “you do know what you’re doing.” The helpless-feeling Jonathan wistfully responds, “I wish I had encouraging outerwear.”
As that exchange suggests, Ms. Gibson has a lovely affinity for parchment-dry humor that softens the sadder undercurrents of “Placebo.” And she imbues her characters with an affection for wordplay and the oddities of language that finds Louise and Jonathan confusing the words “needing” and “kneading” (in a discussion of her dislike of massages), and arguing idly whether a “modicum” of something actually sounds worse than “nothing.” Like Will Eno, Ms. Gibson puts amusingly off-kilter, slightly stylized exchanges in the mouths of her everyday characters with convincing grace.
The laughs provide a helpful binding agent, because in some respects Ms. Gibson hasn’t managed to cohesively weave together the two strands of the play. Louise’s research, seen through her encounters with Mary, played with a forceful sense of low-level desperation by Ms. Lozano, mostly proceeds on its own track, while the internal tensions in the relationship between Jonathan and Louise percolate in a separate sphere. It’s not until the final scene in the play, which runs a little over 90 minutes without intermission, that Louise and Jonathan get around to discussing the intimate details of their sex life, which he has found less than satisfactory.
Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000
The director Daniel Aukin, Ms. Gibson’s longtime collaborator, keeps the zigzagging between the story lines smooth, aided significantly by the set design of David Zinn, which deftly combines Louise and Jonathan’s minimally furnished apartment with the lab where Louise works and the break room where she broods over her mother’s illness or Jonathan’s increasing stress.
It’s in this dreary fluorescent-lit room that Louise strikes up a friendship with a co-worker at the hospital, Tom (Alex Hurt), who hits her up for a dollar one day when the vending machine keeps spitting his out. (That vending machine plays a role in a loopy, antic later scene.) As Jonathan withdraws from Louise, eventually asking her to move out while he finishes his work, to her confusion and dismay — she draws closer to the enigmatic Tom, played by Mr. Hurt with an unusual combination of poker-faced diffidence and under-the- surface gentleness. I don’t think I’ve seen deadpan and sexy combined with such effectiveness before.
Ms. Coon and Mr. Harper are also excellent. Ms. Coon, a Tony nominee for her Honey in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (she also appeared in the movie “Gone Girl”), brings a touching, forlorn quality to her performance that makes us understand how Louise might cling to that lab coat as if it were a security blanket. But when she and Jonathan air their grievances in the long (and not altogether captivating) final scene, Ms. Coon’s Louise flares up into an understandable righteousness, undercut by her bumbling attempts to gather all her possessions. (At one point she pathetically attempts to put a floor lamp in a garbage bag.)
Jonathan is the play’s trickiest role. His motivations remain fairly opaque; we never quite come to understand why he suddenly rejects Louise, although it seems to have something to do with his fear that he will never succeed as she expects him to. Happily, Mr. Harper displays a brooding interiority that makes it seem natural that Jonathan would close in upon himself when his insecurities become too much to bear.
Among other things, we learn (or at least I learned) from Ms. Gibson the origins of the word “placebo.” Apparently, the term dates from the Middle Ages, when it referred to professional mourners, people who “were hired to act like they care.” Its function in the play, beyond the obvious reference to the drug trial, is fairly oblique — as is the way with this gifted writer. But the small, prickly conflicts that arise between Jonathan and Louise, and the way each responds, offer a melancholy reminder that it is always hard to tell whether the love you’re receiving, or giving, is the real, sufficient thing, or merely a heart-addling place holder.