When, near the end of the new movie musical “The Color Purple,”  Fantasia Barrino as Celie sings “I don’t need you to love me….I’m beautiful, yes I’m beautiful, and I’m here,” it’s thrilling – but not quite as thrilling as when Cynthia Erivo sung it in the Broadway revival of the stage musical eight years ago. 

There is a reason for this that has nothing to do with the performer. Barrino, the third-season American Idol winner, made an acclaimed Broadway debut replacing the Tony-winning LaChanze as Celie in the original 2005 Broadway production, and she is awesome on screen. The audience at the screening I attended loudly applauded her at the end of “I’m Here.” 

But of course Barrino couldn’t hear us, nor react to us in turn. Such an exchange is the irreplaceable emotional charge that live theater provides both actor and audience, which surely helps explain why the Broadway audience in 2015 was far more demonstrative at the end of that song  – rising up, tearing up and outright cheering.

Maybe that’s the tradeoff for any stage musical reaching a wider audience through a movie adaptation. 

But if something is lost in the translation of “The Color Purple” from stage musical to movie musical, something is gained. The musical numbers often take place in the kind of expansive on-location settings that the theater can’t easily replicate.  

To someone who saw the Broadway musical, or someone who loves musicals, these numbers, more than any other element in the movie, justify yet another version of a story that began as an epistolary novel by Alice Walker in 1982; became a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1985; was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2005  with a book by Marsha Norman, and music and lyrics by the songwriting team of Brenda Russell, Allee Willis & Stephen Bray; then reimagined for Broadway ten years later  by director John Doyle, with the  powerhouse trio of Erivo, Jennifer Hudson and Danielle Brooks all making impressive Broadway debuts.

Clockwise from left: Jon Batiste as Grady; Fantasia Barrino and Tarija P. Henson as Celie and Shug; Danielle Brooks and Corey Hawkins as Sofia and Harpo

The film has a first-rate cast that’s just as dynamic, and a screenplay by Marcus Gardley, a talented playwright (“black odyssey” and “The House That Will Not Stand“) who wrote episodes for the TV series “The Chi.” But though the running time is almost exactly the same as the 2015 revival of the Broadway musical, the movie feels way longer.  Both stage and screen tell the brutal story of Celie surviving abuse, neglect and betrayal over forty years leading to that life-affirming moment of “I’m Here.” Both stage and screen thread the grim goings-on with rousing, tuneful musical numbers.  But while the story and the numbers merged into a seamless whole on stage, they sometimes seem awkwardly at odds in the new movie.

Some film critics with no background or feel for musical theater have observed this imbalance, but seem to blame it on what one called the “show tunes.”  It felt to me exactly the opposite. The phrase “show tunes” feels disparaging; it suggests that the early twentieth century rural Southern Black characters break out into “The hills are alive with the sound of music!” The Broadway score (which is the core of the movie, albeit with substantial additions and subtractions*) was the songwriting trio’s first musical; they were rooted in a different genre of music. “I grew up in Detroit,” one of them, the late Allee Willis,  told me years ago in an interview, “and my life was about Motown and pop and soul music.”  

The movie begins with a bird’s-eye view of the character named Mister (Colman Domingo) ambling on his horse, plucking a slow bluegrassy tune on his banjo, as he passes underneath a tree where the young Celie and her sister Nettie are playing a child’s game with their hands, singing “Huckleberry Pie.” This segues immediately into “Mysterious Ways,” a full-out gospel number performed by the entire cast in their Sunday finest, as they dance their way through the countryside and the town and wind up at  the local church presides over the rip-roaring Reverend Avery (David Alan Grier.) 

As the years go by, the genre of music reflects the eras’ changing tastes, never completely leaving the blues or gospel but expanding to include ragtime, jazz, big band, soul, pop.  Danielle Brooks, who made her splashy Broadway debut as the outspoken (but eventually broken) Sofia, here outdoes herself in the same role, especially on the number “Hello No.” Taraji P. Henson as blues singer Shug Avery (a stand-out in the part that marked Jennifer Hudson’s Broadway debut) works wonders in “Push Da Button,” her sexy nightclub number, complete with outsized red-feathered headdress and slinky shimmering red dress.

Director Blitz Bazawule, a filmmaker from Ghana who worked with Beyoncé on her 2020 visual album “Black Is King,” has a sure hand with the musical numbers, aided immeasurably by choreographer Fatima Robinson. Robinson has no Broadway credits, but she choreographed the film adaptation of “Dreamgirls” (and also videos for everybody from Michael Jackson to the Backstreet Boys and, yes, Beyonce.) 

They put together one ravishing number after another to accompany the songs: Prisoners in a chain gang hammer the barren earth while washerwomen scrub clothes on their washboards near a waterfall in an exquisite blues; Celie and Shug, whose love is in large measure what liberates Celie, make Astaire-like ballroom moves in a fantasy scene out of a 1930s Hollywood movie; there’s a traditional tribal dance in Africa.

This song and dance might seem alien to moviegoers who know “The Color Purple” only as the Spielberg movie or Walker’s novel, which is structured as a series of letters that Celie writes to God. Both dwell on the unspeakably ugly pile-on of traumas to which Celie is subjected before her liberation:  Alfonso, the only father she’s ever known (Deon Cole in the new movie) rapes and impregnates the barely adolescent Celie twice, and both times takes her babies away from her; then he sells her for a cow to Mister (Domingo) who as her husband physically beats her and emotionally abuses her, banishing from his house the one person in the world that loves her, her sister Nettie (portrayed in youth by Halle Bailey and later by Ciara.)  

Domingo, a stalwart of the New York stage as both a playwright and performer, is having a Hollywood moment, thanks to his superb performance in the title role of “Rustin.” But his Mister is hard to take – both for the character’s over-the-top brutality graphically depicted and then his abrupt change of heart that leads to a complete transformation. These scenes are no more “realistic” than the musical numbers; they just follow a different template.

 Whoopi Goldberg has a brief uncredited role in the new movie as a midwife to Celie’s second baby, a nod to her role as Celie in the 1985 movie, her first in a big Hollywood movie. It’s bracing to grasp how long ago that was – that both she and Oprah Winfrey (who portrayed Sofia) were relatively unknown before that movie, which served as midwife to their stardom.

One might argue that times have changed, that it’s easier now to see the ugly scenes in “The Color Purple” as exactly the sort of Black trauma porn that the new movie “American Fiction” satirizes and implicitly condemns; that it isn’t a complete stretch to see the musical numbers in “The Color Purple” as a better reflection of what Alice Walker has said was her intent with her novel — a “theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual.”

“The Color Purple,” is in cinemas starting December 25th. It is rated PG-13: Contains mature thematic elements including domestic abuse and child rape, sexuality, violence and strong language. 141 minutes. (The 2015 Broadway musical was 155 minutes, but that included a 15-minute intermission.)

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*Songs in the new movie added to, and subtracted from, the Broadway musical:
“Somebody Gonna Love You,” “Our Prayer,” “Big Dog,” “Dear God – Sofia,” “Brown Betty,” “Uh-Oh,” “African Homeland,” “Celie’s Curse,” “Any Little Thing,” and “What About Love (Reprise)” have been cut from the film.
Songs sung by the “Church Ladies” in the musical have also been cut, including “That Fine Mister,” “A Tree Named Sofia,” and “All We Got to Say.”
New songs include “Keep It Movin'” written by Halle Bailey (who also sings it), Denisia Andrews, Brittany Coney and Morten Ristorp, and the end credit song “Superpower (I)” written by Terius Gesteelde-Diamant and sung by Fantasia Barrino.
A song by the original Broadway composers but cut from the Broadway production, “She Be Mine” is sung by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as Young Celie.
“Workin'”a new song written by Blitz Bazawule and Nick Baxter, is sung by Corey Hawkins and the ensemble.
“Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)” from the 1985 movie, with music by Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton, and lyrics by Quincy Jones, Rod Temperton and Lionel Richie, has been added back into the film, sung by Taraji P. Henson.