A friend of mine invited me to go see a new musical at the Orpheum in St. Paul Thursday night as a thank you for fixing his computer.  Now, for a long time, I didn’t like musicals and I’d like to share with you how I changed my mind.

I felt guilty for a long time that I didn’t enjoy them and tried to “get” them.  The only one I’d liked was the movie Annie but that only goes so far in conversations.

I realized the problem was I was going to the wrong ones!  I liked seeing people sing when I watched Chicago a few years ago. After that, I found Tyler Perry’s plays and movies which I just loved.  With him, I was suspicious that he would try and preach the gospel all over the storyline.  I was pleasantly surprised watching Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2006 and started renting all of his movies to catch up.  Now, that I was really feeling good about this whole “musical” thing, I ordered Rent from Netflix. I absolutely l-o-v-e-d the movie and was sad I hadn’t seen the live performance of Rent.  I laughed so hard that I was tempted to buy the DVD…that says a lot since I only own 1 DVD movie.

I know that watching movies based on musicals (based on books) is not the “real thing” but it’s a great first step to exploring something new. Thus, that brings me back the point of this blog post.

The Color Purple

Celie is the main character and her life is filled with the drama of not being her own woman.  She is being told what to do, how to act, what to think and who to spend her time with.

Early on, she loses the one person she cares about.  Celie never gives up and keeps hope alive in her heart.  This is what I can truly relate to about the movie.

Now the play diverges here by extending the movie version.  We see new angles for Celie, her sister Nettie, “Mister” (the man she is forced to marry), Harpo, Sofia (Oprah’s character in the movie) and Shug.

The costumes were beautiful; I wanted one of those dresses with the narrow waist and poufy petticoat!

I enjoyed all of the songs except I did fall asleep for a quick snooze early on.  I am notorious for falling asleep while watching movies and being a heavy sleeper.

The stage design kept me interested.  They had some props attached to a rolling support system so characters would be pushed out with the set.

Since the play covered a span of 30+ years, the characters aged.  The makeup and hair folks did a great job.

Seeing performances like this one makes me want to attend more often.  I often get so caught up in technology, I forgot to “feed and water” my mind and soul with events like this.  I thanked my friend profusely for pulling me out of my “coding cave” and was really surprised at how much I liked this musical.

For show information: The Color Purple

My Ticket Stub

Technical geek notes: I used Techsmith’s Snagit to tilt the booklet after I scanned it.

The website http://thecolorpurple.com does not have their canonical url’s setup properly.  They are loosing Google Page Rank because some traffic is going to http://www.colorpurple.com and part is going to http://colorpurple.com

They could modify their .htaccess file to force all traffic to go towards http://www.colorpurple.com