The Color Purple
Shows · The Color Purple
The Color Purple is a musical with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, and book by Marsha Norman. Based on the 1982 novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker and its 1985 film adaptation, the musical follows the journey of Celie, an African American woman in the American South from the early to mid-20th century.
- Opened
- 2005
- Performances
- 910
- Type
- Musical
- Era
- Modern
Productions3 on Broadway
| 2005 | Broadway Theatre Original. December 1, 2005 · Gary Griffin | 910 performances |
| 2013 | Transfer Theatre unknown. July 17, 2013 | |
| 2015 | Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Revival. · John Doyle | 493 performances |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.
Recordings 3 albums held
Licensing 1 entry
| US | Theatrical Rights Worldwide | not stated by this source |
Read from the licensor's own pages and catalogues. Rights move, and an empty row means we have not confirmed a publisher, not that the show cannot be licensed.
28 passages naming The Color Purple, found by keyword across 178 books. It's where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.
The Color Purple takes its cue from Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a poor black woman in rural Georgia, Celie (LaChanze), who overcomes a past of abuse and unendurable hardships to find her own identity and love. book:showtime-a-history-of-the-broadway-musical-theatre-larry-stempel#p709
Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: See Cote. The musical Wicked actually draws directly on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and Frank Wedekind's drama Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) provide the bases for the mus… book:showtime-a-history-of-the-broadway-musical-theatre-larry-stempel#p783
Doyle staged a revival of The Color Purple at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory in 2013; he also served as scenic designer. He received his third Tony Award nomination when the non-actor-musician production, starring Cynthia Erivo, Danielle Brooks, and Jennifer Hudson, transferred to Broadway in November 2015. book:the-stephen-sondheim-encyclopedia-rick-pender-rowman-littlefield-publishing-lanh#p198
Best Visiting Production: The Color Purple (National Tour at Citi PAC) Small Theatre book:theatre-world-2009-2010-season-v-66-willis#p443
The Color Purple 910 performances Opened December 1, 2005 Closed February 24, 2008 book:theatre-world-2009-2010-season-v-66-willis#p457
Color Purple, The 439, 453 book:theatre-world-2009-2010-season-v-66-willis#p499
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