The Color Purple overview – Emotional adaptation filled with highly effective performances

On its awards-laden trek from web page to display screen and stage, The Color Purple has preached hope and the resilience of the human spirit within the face of oppression, racial segregation and home violence. First as a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel penned by Alice Walker, then as Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, and most lately as a Tony Award-winning musical stage play that transferred to London in 2013.

Director Blitz Bazawule’s huge display screen adaptation of the theatre staging attracts a few of its emotional firepower from American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino as Celie, a survivor of bodily and sexual abuse in early Twentieth-century rural Georgia who is decided to seek out her place in a merciless, unforgiving world.

Married off to farmer Mister (Colman Domingo), Celie is worn right down to quiet subservience till her husband’s mistress, sultry jazz singer Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson), sashays into city and lights a hearth of insurrection. Confidante Sofia (Danielle Brooks) followers the flames and units in movement Celie’s hard-fought self-empowerment, echoed within the barnstorming I’m Here.

The steaminess rises for Henson’s show-stopping solo: a sweat-glistening efficiency of Push Da Button sporting an alluring purple beaded costume and feather headpiece, which will get a riverside juke joint a-jumpin’ and our toes tapping.

In the darkest hours, music is a guiding gentle.