The 21st-century Broadway musical isn’t the place to go for artistic surprises. The risks are great, the odds for success a one-in-a-hundred long shot, the formulas rigorous and calculated.

In many ways, the 2008 musical The Color Purple is echt contemporary Broadway. Inspired by Alice Walker’s iconic American best-seller and the Oscar nominated film based on the novel, it’s a familiar story that also brings with it a who’s who of entertainment muscle: Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover. When it was brought to Broadway, it drew A-list talent from the pop music world, including producer Quincy Jones (who composed the score for the film), and songwriter Allee Willis, a composer who may not be a household word, but whose songs have sold an estimated 50 million records.

The Milwaukee Rep’s production of The Color Purple, however, isn’t without surprises, most of which are a credit to Mark Clements and his approach to bringing large-scale musicals to the Rep’s Quadracci Powerhouse stage. The inspirational story of Celie–who rises from a poor, abused life in the rural south to become a (yes) “self-actualized,” independent woman–spans decades. And the challenges of telling that story onstage are considerable. No less a playwright than Marsha Norman gave it her best shot, but the limitations of the form aren’t too hard to find. Characters like Mister (played assuredly by Nathaniel Stampley) and Sofia (the big-spirited Bethany Thomas) seem to transform in the blink of an eye. And it sometimes feels like you need a flowchart to follow the various couplings and uncouplings of the story’s characters.

The music doesn’t help much. If you can’t recall a song from The Color Purple, I’m not surprised. When they are in traditional gospel territory, songwriters Willis, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray (yes, it sometimes takes a village to pen a Broadway tune) are secure in the form. And the Rep cast attacks them with rafter shaking soul. But songs that rely on a well-shaped, memorable tune are much harder going, even if the talented Rep singers make the most of them.

But these problems are easy to overlook in the Rep’s superb production. Clements—aided by the ever-morphing, atmospheric settings of scene designer Todd Edward Ivins—tells the story briskly, energetically, sensitively. Most importantly, he uses the show’s best assets—the impressive cast and the intimate scale of the theater—to great advantage. And that’s what makes this production essential.

Did anyone who saw The Color Purple in the near-1800-seat Broadway Theatre—or in the huge auditoriums it played on its national tour (including Uihlein Hall)—connect with the character of Celie in a real, human way? Performed at The Rep by Zonya Love, who played the role at the end of the show’s Broadway run, Celie is a vital human being. And you feel it because her performance is detailed and rich, and you’re close enough to see it. The same is true of other characters: Mister’s powerful act two song transforms him from a cartoon villain to a flawed human being. And Celie’s budding romance with Shug Avery (the cool and wiry Christina Acosta Robinson) is full of tenderness and human warmth.

Those connections between performers and audience give a good measure of truth to some of the show’s “pow” moments, which otherwise would be just American Idol clichés. And they show why The Rep’s versions of Broadway musicals aren’t “Broadway” at all, but stories with dramatic vitality that live and breathe.

And sing, too.

“Intimacy” is relative, of course. The 800-seat Powerhouse
theater may seem cozier than a big Broadway house, but the In Tandem
Theatre—all 99 seats—is a perfect and necessary space to share with the
Wingfield family, the character’s of Tennessee Williams’ touching drama, The Glass Menagerie.

In Tandem Theatre’s excellent and moving production of the
1944 masterpiece shows the shattering power that real theatrical intimacy can
have. If you know Williams, you know the powerful connections between the playwright
and this story. Menagerie is the most
personal play of a very personal playwright, a gently told, but devastating
memorial to his St. Louis family, his sister Rose, in particular.

Laura, the character based on Rose, is the fragile heart of
the play, an almost silent, ghostly presence in the story. Played by Grace
DeWolff, she makes only a cursory impression through the first half of the
play. She, of course, is in the shadow of Amanda Wingfield, the mother who has
become an icon in American culture. But even though Angela Iannone deservedly
gets star billing in this production, she plays Amanda with admirable
restraint. Watch her in the final minutes of the play, as she processes the
crushing information she just received about Laura’s “gentleman caller”—head
erect and magisterially still, she looks off into space, into the future,
perhaps, and you can feel her world collapsing in horrifying silence.

Director Mary MacDonald Kerr seems to know that such
stylistic reticence is the key to a potent rendering of Williams’ remembered
world. It is a “memory play” after all, and the tone of the domestic scenes
well matches the gentle heartbreak that infuses Tom’s moonlit narration. John
Glowacki plays him beautifully, without overemphasizing the poetry of Williams’
rich language. Still, you can see and hear the poet emerging, and the slow
heartbreak that brought Tennessee himself into the creative life.

The final scene belongs to DeWolff and her gentleman caller,
Jim, touchingly played by Rick Pendzich. In his deliberate, slightly puffed-up
confidence, Pendzich captures the American optimism that Williams finds so
suspect. But he also infuses the scene with great tenderness, and for a while,
you begin to sense a world in which all suffering can be erased with a pep-talk
or slap on the back—or perhaps a night-school course in radio engineering.

That’s the world of Dale Carnegie or Tony Robbins, perhaps. But
that’s not Williams’ world. Watching DeWolff’s Laura slowly and beautifully
blossom as Jim delivers his affectionate pep talk, you can truly feel the force
of Williams’ delicate but tragic vision. As he wrote in the New York Herald Tribune shortly after
his play opened on Broadway, the glass animals of Laura’s collection, “came to
represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to the recollections
of things past. They stood for all the small and tender things that relieve the
austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive.”

And, of course, make it
unendurable when they are shattered. 

Photos of The Color Purple by Michael Brosilow. Photos of The Glass Menagerie by Mark Frohna.