This semester I am teaching an elective on musicals, which the final presentation on Howard Ashman in this past fall’s elective on Disney provides a nice segue for. Recruited from Broadway after the success of his musical Little Shop of Horrors, Ashman initiated the Disney renaissance era by incorporating Broadway’s musical formula into animation in his work on The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992). After single-handedly renovating Times Square and flipping these Broadway-inspired animated movie musicals back into successful stage musicals, Disney has since tried to replicate this pattern of success by recruiting Hamilton auteur Lin-Manuel Miranda.
This past Christmas the movie musical The Color Purple (2023) was released, giving us the fourth iteration of this narrative by way of an adaptation of the Broadway show (2005/2015) that was an adaptation of the movie directed by Steven Spielberg (1985) that was an adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel (1983). Or rather the Broadway show is an adaptation of the novel and the movie; its summary on Wikipedia shows it includes elements of the novel that neither movie does. Notably, Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey have been involved in all three adaptations of Walker’s story. Walker was involved in the production of the movies but does not appear to have been involved in the Broadway productions.
Summary:
While the novel is told in the epistolary form of letters that the 1985 version adapts via voiceover, the 2023 movie dispenses with this element. The basic story in a nutshell in all versions is that the main character, Celie, has two children by the man she believes is her father, but her father takes the children from her so their whereabouts are unknown by the time he marries her off to a man who goes by “Mister,” who actually wanted to marry Celie’s sister Nettie. Nettie shows up at Mister’s and Celie’s after their father starts abusing her, but when Nettie rejects Mister’s advances, he throws her out, with Nettie promising Celie she’ll write every day as she departs. Mister guards the mailbox, however, and Celie never gets any letters and years pass as she raises Mister’s children, including Harpo, who marries a spirited woman named Sofia who shortly leaves him when he attempts to beat her to get her to obey him as his father does to Celie. Harpo builds a juke joint on some swampland, and Shug Avery, a blues singer Mister says is the woman he should have married, visits and performs there. Shug and Celie bond during Shug’s visit. In an interim when Shug is gone, Sofia gets into an altercation with the mayor’s wife when she refuses a job offer to be her maid, and is imprisoned for six years. When Shug visits Mister’s again, showing up with a husband in tow, she checks the mail and finds a letter from Nettie to Celie revealing she’s alive and in Africa with a missionary couple who ended up adopting Celie’s two children when they couldn’t have any of their own, prompting Shug and Celie to search the house and find the rest of Nettie’s letters that Mister’s been hiding. At a big family dinner, Shug tells Mister that Celie is going back to Memphis with her and her husband, and Celie rebukes Mister for taking Nettie away her, telling him everything he thinks about will crumble until he does right by her (the confrontation revives Sofia, whose spirit has been broken by her ordeal, and Harpo’s girlfriend decides to go to Memphis as well). When the man Celie thought was her father dies, she learns that he is not her blood father but her stepfather, and that her real father left her and Nettie land and a shop that Celie uses to sell pants that she makes. Shug reconciles with her disapproving father, who is a reverend. Mister deteriorates until he gets a letter from Nettie to Celie noting they need to prove their citizenship to return to America because their papers were destroyed, and he pays the immigration service the necessary fees. Nettie returns home with Celie’s grown children in tow, and all are reunited.
Analysis of Music’s Role in the Narrative:
The 2023 narrative actively incorporates music into its structure by opening with the notes of Mister’s banjo that he’s playing as he rides his horse under the branch of a tree where Celie and Nettie are playing a hand-clapping game to the tune of a song they’re singing. The film ends in this same physical location with a big Easter dinner set up under the tree, the location of Nettie’s return with Celie’s children, with Nettie revealing her presence to Celie by singing the same song the two were singing together at the beginning.
If one major narrative element is the arc of Celie’s increasing empowerment, Sofia’s role in this arc is musically emphasized by Sofia singing the song “Hell No!” in the sequence where she leaves Harpo for trying to beat her, a musicalized version of the phrase Sofia utters in the novel when the mayor’s wife asks if Sofia will be her maid. At this point Sofia encourages Celie to stand up for herself, and later in the film, Celie singing a snatch of this song after visiting Sofia in prison marks her increasing empowerment, which crescendos in the confrontation with Mister over having taken Nettie from her (which fittingly helps Sofia return to her previously empowered state).
While Celie’s curse on Mister for taking Nettie from her is in both movies nearly verbatim from the novel, a major change both movies make to the book is that Mister “does right” by Celie by paying for Nettie et al’s passage home. In the novel, he “does right” by Celie by giving her more of Nettie’s letters–“Harpo made him send you the rest of your sister’s letters. Right after that he start to improve”–but has no hand in getting them back to America. In the novel’s epistolary form, Celie addresses her letters to God until the point she learns that Nettie is not dead as she thought, at which point she starts addressing her letters to Nettie. At the point of Mister “doing right” by giving her more of Nettie’s letters, we get the content of those letters and a lot more detail about Nettie’s experiences in Africa than is accounted for in either movie. Then Celie and Nettie write back and forth with the novel alternating between those letters, and Celie gets word that Nettie’s ship back to America sank and she’s dead, but still gets letters from her due to some lag time, and continues addressing her letters to Nettie despite believing she’s dead. But the letter recounting Nettie’s return is addressed:
DEAR GOD. DEAR STARS, DEAR TREES, DEAR SKY, DEAR PEOPLES. DEAR EVERYTHING. DEAR GOD.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1983).
This signals a renewed faith in God that also brings us to the novel’s title’s connection to same:
God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1983).
This exchange from the novel between Shug and Celie revealing the title as a corollary for the presence of God appears in both movies verbatim, but the conversation in the novel is a lot longer and references what the 1985 movie got a lot of criticism for excising: the overtly romantic relationship between Shug and Celie. Narratively, the 2023 movie plays on the arc of Celie’s faith this conversation is pivotal in by having Celie’s stepfather say when he takes her children that he’s “giving them to God,” with Celie asking Nettie, “Why don’t God give them back?” Celie’s empowerment arc leads her to stand up to Mister and curse him, which in turn prompts him to bring Nettie, and by extension Celie’s children, back, which shows Celie God did indeed give her children back, and the musical version reinforces this with the closing number following the familiar reunion entitled “The Color Purple,” articulating its connection to God and God’s connection in turn to Celie’s empowerment arc:
[Verse 1]
“The Color Purple,” The Color Purple (2023).
Dear God, dear stars
Dear trees, dear sky
Dear peoples, dear everything
Dear God
God is inside me and everyone else
That was, forever will be
I came into this world with God
And when I finally looked inside
I found it
Just as close as my breath is to me
…
[Chorus]
Like a blade of corn (Yeah, yeah, yeah)
Like a honey bee (Ooh)
Like a waterfall (Like, ooh)
All a part of me
Like the color purple
Where do it come from? (Tell, where does it come from?)
Now my eyes are open (Now my eyes are open)
Look what God has done
Mister’s role in bringing Nettie back in the movie versions is a product of Celie’s empowerment and might seem narratively tighter than the novel, in which Nettie et al make their way back on their own. But this narrative connection becomes more necessary due to the excision of the element of Shug and Celie’s romantic relationship in both movies. In the novel, Shug leaves Celie because she falls in love with someone else, prompting Celie and Mister to forge a relationship over their shared love of Shug and shared experience of being abandoned by her. I was certainly hoping that the 2023 version would make Shug and Celie’s queer relationship more prominent, and while it’s more prominent than the 1985 version, it still feels shortchanged. The director seems to defend a narrative emphasis on their romance via the number”Push Da Button”: “there’s still a lot of storytelling going on” via a choice Shug makes about who is the “beneficiary” of the performance, constituting “a big emotional and romantic moment.”
But others agree with me that this adaptation is “is frustratingly coy about the queerness of its protaganist [sic].” The two musical numbers that reinforce Celie’s sexual attraction to Shug are both in her head:
In one moment, Celie (a tender Fantasia Barrino) fantasizes as she draws Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson) a bath; in her mind’s eye, Celie traces Shug’s sudsy arm as the two are slowly spun on an imagined turntable. In another sequence, the two perform an elaborate dance in flapper dresses, before sharing their first, real-life kiss.
Gloria Oladipo, “The latest adaptation of The Color Purple fails its lead character” (January 2, 2024).
First and only real-life kiss in the movie, just like the 1985 version. We get one sliver more in 2023: that we cut, briefly, to Shug and Celie are sleeping in the same bed after this kiss. While all song and dance numbers aren’t “realistic,” there’s a distinction between whether they depict something that happens in the “real” world of the movie or whether it’s fantasy: the number in Celie’s pants store depicts her “real” business triumph, not just an imagined one. While something “really” happens between Shug and Celie, it gets more airtime in the movie’s fantasy world rather than its “real” one.
My other beef with the 2023 version is what seems like a missed opportunity in the sequence where Shug reconciles with her disapproving reverend father. Since Shug is a singer, the original movie, while not being a “musical” by genre, does incorporate two major musical numbers: Shug’s performance in Harpo’s juke (in which she sings “Miss Celie’s Blues,” which the 2023 version places later in time after Celie lives with Shug in Memphis in favor of “Push Da Button” in the juke sequence), and the sequence in which Shug reconciles with her father, which starts with her singing at the juke then stopping when she hears the gospel choir singing at her father’s very proximate church. Shug takes up the gospel number as she leads the juke crowd into the church, uniting blues and gospel and revealing the underlying similarities between these apparently opposing genres as she reunites with her father:
In the 2023 version, Shug simply walks into the empty church where her father is playing the piano and the two start singing together in what feels like a very subdued and to me honestly boring number. Maybe the director didn’t want to copy the original, but in this instance, he should have. The themes of the overlap between blues and gospel music emphasized in ‘85 by this number (underscoring the richness of Shug’s nontraditional conception of God and spirituality that the title The Color Purple highlights) are lost here.
-SCR
Final Musical Project Inspiration:
The 2023 movie musical is an adaptation of the stage musical that is in turn an adaptation of the 1985 movie and the novel.
Inspired by Celie’s queerness in the novel being more prominent in the stage musical than the movie musical: Write a musical adapting a movie that was adapted from a novel–more specifically, a movie that made significant changes to the novel so your musical version includes some elements from the novel that were not in the movie version. (Example: The Shining…)
OR: Include a reprise of a song in your musical project to represent two characters who are symbolically swapping places due to events in the plot.
Discussion Questions:
- What occurrences of the reprise in musicals can you think of and what narrative role did they play?
- What memorable lines from any novels or movies you have read or seen might make the good basis of a song in a musical adaptation of that novel or movie?
- In an adaptation, is a tighter narrative worth the sacrifice of a significant theme?
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