Preview '05-'06: Novels Musicalized
Both Dessa Rose and The Color Purple are based on acclaimed novels by female African-American writers. Celie, the heroine of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel The Color Purple, is a black woman in the early-twentieth-century South. In the epistolary novel, Celie is raped by a stepfather who sells off her children to a minister. Separated from her sister Nettie, who becomes a missionary in Africa, Celie is herself sold off to an abusive husband named Albert. Also prominent in the action are Sophia, the wife of her husband's son, and Shug, a female blues singer who is Albert's mistress.
The characters of Walker's novel reached a wider public in 1985, when The Color Purple became a film, directed by Stephen Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, Oprah Winfrey as Sophia, and Danny Glover as Albert. Where the novel had been criticized for its depiction of black men as abusive, Spielberg was criticized for softening a strong source.
Running in September and October of 2004, the Alliance Theatre production of The Color Purple had a book by Marsha Norman, who was simultaneously represented on Broadway by a revival of 'Night Mother. The gospel/r&b score was the work of Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, theatrical newcomers from the pop world. The musical is based not only on Walker's novel but also on the screenplay of the film.
LaChanze was joined at the Alliance by cast members Adriane Lenox 2005 Tony winner for Doubt as Shug; Felicia P. Fields as Sophia; Saycon Sengbloh as Nettie; and Kingsley Leggs as Mister. The director is Chicago-based Gary Griffin, who has established a reputation through his small-scale reinventions of musicals like My Fair Lady and Pacific Overtures. In New York, Griffin has successfully guided the recent Encores! mountings of The New Moon, Pardon My English, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Apple Tree. The choreographer was Ken Roberson Avenue Q, All Shook Up.
Reviewing the Atlanta production in Variety, Chris Jones described The Color Purple as "a solid, capably executed piece of musical theatre....Gary Griffin's direction is smart and well-paced. And the show is careful to reflect its beloved source...with great fealty to its themes....What's missing...is a sense of the sweeping poetic scale demanded by both the material and the form...The show makes sense, but never soars as one suspects it could....Too little of the necessary theatricality is in evidence, and the place to start the changes is with the score."
The local Atlanta critics were similarly mixed in their verdicts, so no doubt work has been done on the show since last fall, resulting in a recent New York summer workshop that featured in leading roles LaChanze, Fields, Leggs, Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, and Rutina Wesley. The choreographer is now Donald Byrd. The Color Purple will open on December 1 at the Broadway Theatre, which became available when The Mambo Kings closed in San Francisco.
Another adaptation of a novel, or in this case novels, is Lestat, which is slated for a spring Broadway bow with no date or theatre set at this time. The show is getting a traditional tryout immediately prior to Broadway, this winter at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, where Wicked had its world premiere.
One might not have thought that Broadway would see another vampire musical after the twin disasters of Dance of the Vampires and Dracula. Is it safe to say that Lestat will be the best of the three? It wouldn't be difficult. It's also safe to say that Lestat will, unlike Dance but like Dracula, take its vampires seriously, in no way spoofing it up.
The musical is based on three of Rice's vampire chronicles, Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, and The Vampire Lestat. I'm only familiar with this saga from the Neil Jordan-directed, Rice-written 1994 film version of the first title, starring Tom Cruise as the vampire Lestat, and featuring such other characters as his victim, Louis Brad Pitt, their "daughter" Claudia Kirsten Dunst, and a pair of theatrical vampires Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea. Set mostly in New Orleans, the film begins and ends in the musical's tryout town, San Francisco. The film told its story in flashback, with Christian Slater interviewing 200-year-old Louis as the picture's framing device.
On the basis of The Lion King and Aida, many seemed to dismiss Elton John's career as a theatrical composer. That has changed with the recent, smash London success of his latest musical, Billy Elliot, the score of which received praise from no less an observer than The Times' Ben Brantley. One suspects that Lestat's score, with lyrics by John's longtime collaborator, Bernie Taupin, will be more pop oriented than that of Billy Elliot, although John has made it clear that Lestat is not a rock opera.
Lestat's book is the work of Linda Woolverton, the author Beauty and the Beast or co-author Aida of a couple of the more successful musicals in recent Broadway history. That's not to mention that the stage version of The Lion King was based on a screenplay she co-authored. The director of Lestat is Beauty and the Beast's Robert Jess Roth, who had less luck as the director of the first incarnation of Aida, Elaborate Lives, at the Alliance in Atlanta when Woolverton was sole writer of the book.
There was considerable controversy over the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat in the film, with Rice herself condemning the casting then later recanting. Thus far, there has been no controversy about the actor selected to play Lestat in the musical, Hugh Panaro, whose experience with the title role in The Phantom of the Opera should come in handy. Jim Stanek will play Louis, and Carolee Carmello looks set to play Lestat's mother.