Saturday: Butley and The Color Purple

Now, on Saturday we saw two shows — our second play of the visit, the revival of Simon Gray’s Butley, starring Nathan Lane, and The Color Purple: the Musical.

Now. This has been a remarkable trip in many ways, in that nothing that we’d seen so far had disappointed us. In some cases (Losing Louie, Jersey Boys) that was because we didn’t have huge expectations; in some cases (Grey Gardens, The Drowsy Chaperone) we had no expectations at all. But the point remains that we weren’t disappointed because the shows we saw were good shows.

Butley was no exception. We had tickets to see it as a matinée, but the entire cast was performing, Nathan Lane included. It was not an easy play to watch — it’s very literary, and you have to pay attention to what’s going on. But it’s rewarding.

In brief, Ben Butley is an English don whose life is falling apart in the early 1970s. He’s not a pleasant man, and all his relationships are currently failing — in fact, the play takes place on the very day that this is happening. The cast isn’t huge, but Butley is the focus of the play. His character is on stage for almost the whole time, and the supporting cast has to be excellent as well.

The whole thing was excellent. The cast — most of whom were American — mastered the accents and the attitudes of the time and the place well. The play itself wasn’t easy, and often the people around us — the usual matinée crowd, many of whom had come expressly to see Nathan Lane and not much else — didn’t catch the language or the references. Butley is an English don, and the poets he refers to are British — familiar enough to me, but not so much to an American audience.

The only problem I had is the danger that comes from casting a major star in a lead role, and especially in one that is as much of a character study as Ben Butley is. I am not saying that Nathan Lane didn’t do a good job — he was excellent. But I had trouble forgetting he was, well, Nathan Lane and not Ben Butley, and I was conscious as a result that he was playing a role, and that detracted from the full impact for me. On the other hand, Mummy and I had talked not so long ago about the very same thing with Olivier, especially in his earlier roles. It’s a danger that comes with casting stars in lead roles, unfortunately. But that aside, Butley was very good — and Philip didn’t have the problem at all.

We went to The Color Purple buoyed up by our experiences all week. We walked up to 53rd Street and saw the African American audiences that were missing from the majority of the other shows we’d seen. The audience was the complexion of any normal Bahamian audience, though it was far better behaved — nobody jumped the line to get in — which stretched all the way down the block and around the corner. We had great seats, in the mezzanine (balcony) in the centre, and the set was impressive — a great twisted tree silhouetted against an evening sky and a shack on the other side of the stage.

But we were disappointed. Let me say this now: nothing about the cast disappointed us. They were excellent. The performances and the production were all strong — the sets were spectacular, with all the bells and whistles of a big-money Broadway production; the singing was top-notch, the dancing was strong, and the costumes were incredible. The story moves from the 1900s to the 1940s and the costumes, from hairstyle and makeup down to shoes — change with the times — and every cast member had every change.

But the story and the lyrics and the music were all forgettable.

The problem, in a nutshell, was that the musical tried to do too much. It tried to be faithful to the book, even going so far as putting scenes into the musical that the film had taken out. Now Alice Walker’s book, while powerful, is flawed; it goes on too long, and it romanticizes to some degree the whole Africa episode. But in the book the flaws are minor. The musical, though, rather than recognizing those flaws and working around them, maybe even attempting to avoid them, blew them to major proportions. The whole Africa episode was reinterpreted and romanticized far more than Walker’s original, and it felt artificial and almost offensive. It looked like something out of The Lion King, but it didn’t work nearly as well; after all, The Lion King was a cartoon, and that sort of scene fit better because it was cartoonish. And the story went on and on, including every small episode of Celie’s life, rather than looking for the story arc and playing to its strengths. In all, the musical, which went on for three hours, felt long, and didn’t engage us in the powerful story of Celie and her finding of her strength in any way near the way it should.

Part of the problem was the music itself, which was neither great nor terrible, but which didn’t say anything at all. It sounded like a string of minor jazz, soul and gospel hits all strung together, but it didn’t add anything really to the story. The only bit of the adaptation that had promise was the inclusion of the “Church Women”, who made comments on individuals’ characters and (in the beginning at least) helped move the story along. If they had been used throughout the musical and had been put to work to help move the faltering second half, I think it would have been better. As it was, while we were not sorry we saw the show, and we would probably recommend that Bahamians go and see it, if only for the singing and the production, and for the pleasure of seeing black people working. But we wouldn’t go out of our way to see it again.