The Color Purple – at Home – Curve Leicester

Ako Mitchell and T’Shan Williams in The Color Purple at Home at Curve Leicester. Picture: Pamela Raith

The Color Purple at Home is streaming from Curve Leicester until 7 March 2021.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

If the cynics are right, if musical theatre is indeed all jazz hands and pomp and fluff – a medium incapable of supporting the weight of “important” stories – then this musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple could not exist. Written by Marsha Norman, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, this musical opened on Broadway in 2005 and has been a critical and commercial hit in various incarnations since.

If you are not familiar with the novel or Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 film adaptation, be aware that this story does include intense scenes of physical, sexual and racial abuse. The abject horror that protagonist Celie is forced to endure makes her strength and resistance a powerful and inspiring expression of queer black womanhood. The gospel and soul musical theatre score is appropriate to both the characters and the tone and is a key part of ensuring the show lifts anchor from the quite shocking waters of its setup.

Early 2021 is a difficult time to stage theatre, but after a year of the industry’s tentative experiments with streaming, Leicester Curve and Birmingham Hippodrome’s The Color Purple at Home – a streamed revival of their 2019 stage production – is a bold demonstration of what this new medium born of necessity can be at its very best. Director Tinuke Craig has done an excellent job of putting this filmed performance together in just ten days. A lot of the performers were a part of the original tour, but the challenge of remembering their parts on top of adjusting to new, socially-distanced and adapted-for-film choreography by Mark Smith must have been immense.

A lot of the usual pomp and fluff of musical theatre has been stripped away. There is little in the way of scenery or props and the cameras follow the actors in the round on The Curve’s stage. The camerawork and editing by Crosscut Media are exceptional. This is clearly a patchwork of edited-together performances as opposed to a true live stream, but it shows off the show at its best. As big as some of the musical numbers are, a lot of the piece’s power comes from the delicacy of the emotional performances, something that can easily be lost in a filmed production. Extreme close-ups are used sparingly but effectively, and in other scenes the camerawork is as choreographed as the actors to convey the energy of a dance or fight.

The inventive filming also helps mask the fact that this story of human connection is being performed under strict social-distancing rules. The cast are exceptional in maintaining the reality of the piece despite these restrictions. As protagonist Celie, T’Shan Williams handles some of the show’s biggest emotional songs as well as demonstrating beautiful subtlety and nuance in her smaller moments. She achieves the difficult balance of conveying the devastating impact of Celie’s circumstances while never losing the strength that makes her so compelling. This is an exceptional performance, and we are lucky it has been captured for posterity.

Danielle Fiamanya won a 2019 Stage Debut Award for her portrayal of Celie’s sister Nettie, and she reprises her role here with joyous, hopeful energy. Ako Mitchell’s monstrous Mister is saved from over-the-top villainy by the shades of desperation Mitchell weaves expertly into the character’s cruelty. We may never truly understand him, but by making Mister a decidedly human evil rather than a cartoon he becomes all the more terrifying in those dark early scenes. Carly Mercedes Dyer is a fantastic new addition to the cast as Shug Avery, the juke joint singer whose raucous spirit and kindness prove to be Celie’s awakening and salvation. Her act one showstopper ‘Push Da Button’ is a flooring, powerhouse performance that will no doubt become a sensation when it inevitably finds its way onto YouTube.

There are minor quibbles to be had with the show, but none that detract from a brilliant evening spent on the sofa. The narrative does lose tension by the middle of Act II, but by that point you are so invested in the characters, you are quite happy to spend half an hour seeing how their stories unfold. It also would have been nice to see a bit more of musical director Alex Parker’s excellent band, even if just during the diegetic juke-joint numbers. Though out of the limelight, they make a big impression and give the score phenomenal energy.

There have been many attempts at theatre-at-home over the last year, but this could be the most successful yet in terms of borrowing a little from cinema and television while giving a distinctly ‘theatre’ experience. The Color Purple at Home stands as not just a prime example of what can be achieved with theatrical streaming during a pandemic, but as a proof-of-concept for a burgeoning new medium – one cheaper to produce than most television and film, but with the potential to be even more powerful. The fact that this production is also a timely meditation on issues of race and sex with particularly powerful resonances today makes this perhaps the first truly essential online theatre experience of the entire pandemic.

Ian Bowkett