Director John Doyle has been universally praised for removing dancing and scenery from the Broadway musical “The Color Purple.” But is stripping a big show down to concert scale really an upgrade? The austere approach papers over the flaws of the sprawling, overdrawn story about villainous men and determined, winning women. It doesn’t make the rambling piece a dramatically better musical.
But because Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning 1982 novel delivered a durable message that America still needs to hear about resistance and empowerment, and because the show wraps those sentiments in crafty blues and gospel tunes, even this lean “The Color Purple” — the 2016 Tony Award winner for best revival, now at the Kennedy Center — flickers with powerhouse moments. It’s still impossible not to cheer when the indomitable character Sofia speaks for herself and for her meek friend, Celie, the horribly abused center of the story, by growling the fierce blues number “Hell No!”
Sofia is the first example of female strength Celie needs to see in this tale of black women taking control of their lives in the early 20th-century South. The opening scenes reveal that Celie, played with affecting simplicity by Adrianna Hicks, is routinely raped by the man who is raising her. A bullwhip-cracking suitor comes around trying to marry the homely Celie’s pretty sister, but he settles for Celie when the father figure seals the deal by tossing in a free cow. This toxic masculine environment, forged in part by the harsh recent experience of slavery, is a lot for the women to overcome.
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Celie’s other role model is the man-dazzling blues singer Shug Avery, portrayed with a splendid mix of outgoing style and intimate tenderness by Carla R. Stewart. The songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray paint Shug as raunchy, funny and kind, and the show rises on such solidly sung numbers as Shug’s racy “Push da Button” and her earnest (if borderline sappy) ballad with Celie, “What About Love?”
Doyle declined the vivid, expansive scenery of the 2005 production and instead uses his own drab design: a back wall of smashed planks and dozens of plain wooden chairs. The cast uses the chairs in ways that get exhausting as they swing them high or hop on top. For something else to do, women fold fabric a lot.
Doyle made his mark in musicals with a 2005 “Sweeney Todd” that was so radically slimmed that it eliminated the orchestra and had its actors playing the instruments. That worked; the setting was a madhouse that suited the bloody tale. Doyle did the same thing for Stephen Sondheim’s marital musical “Company,” but the instrument-toting characters looked like oddballs late for band camp.
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This “Color Purple” isn’t that awkward — there’s a hidden eight-piece orchestra somewhere — and the framing of church rituals at the beginning and end gives the production a devotional, redemptive theme. But the writing keeps dropping clues that at heart, it’s big. The burly work songs churn, the blues and gospel anthems soar, and the characters evolve as the saga presses through decades.
Visually you get almost none of this, except in Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes (in a pregnant detail, Celie eventually designs pants). And there is a perverse anti-musical streak in sternly declining to dance to this rousing music ever, even as the vibrant Shug revs up the juke joint. (The show has no choreographer.) Sometimes less is simply less.
Of course the story feels clarified and the 17 performers shine: That’s all there is. But this kind of overpraised minimalism, or “essentialism,” to use Doyle’s preferred term, is a scarecrow version of a heart-on-its-sleeve show whose sweeping, full-throated impulses are all amplitude.
The Color Purple, book by Marsha Norman, music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. Directed by John Doyle. About 2 hours 15 minutes. $79-$149. Through Aug. 26 at the Kennedy Center. 202-467-4600 or kennedy-center.org.
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