简体中文
For 34 years,Oprah Winfreyhas been revisiting “The Color Purple,” as a reader, as a performer and as a producer. And yet, there she was on Tuesday night, in row F at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, mouthing the words to the songs, waving her hands in the air, leading a mid-act standing ovation and weeping once again.
“I don’t know what to say — I was doing the ugly cry,” she told the show’s Tony-nominated actresses,Cynthia Erivoand Danielle Brooks, as she embraced them backstage after seeing, for the second time, the revival ofthe musical versionof the story. “I thought I had seen it, and now I am crying like I had never seen it before.”
Ms. Winfrey, who appeared in the film adaptation of the novel and is a producer of the musical, returned to the show on Tuesday for the first performance featuring Heather Headley, a Tony-winning alumna of Disney’s “The Lion King” and “Aida,” who has succeededJennifer Hudsonas the nightclub singer Shug Avery. But Ms. Winfrey is also on a bit of a theater tear — while in New York this week she is seeing “The Humans,” and this season she has already seen “Hamilton,” “Eclipsed” and “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”
And, as she sees each of them, she considers what it would take for her to get onto the stage as an actress.
“I’ve been thinking about, for the past maybe three years, coming to Broadway myself, but when I see how much work is involved, and the kind of energy it takes to do that every night, I don’t know,” she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “I’m looking for the perfect material. Something will come along. If the right material comes along, then I’ll do it.”
Ms. Winfrey said she had been particularly interested in working with Audra McDonald, a six-time Tony winner, and had told the actress, “I would read the Yellow Pages with you.” They have done two readings together, of “’Night, Mother,” by Marsha Norman, who also wrote the book for the musicalization of “The Color Purple,” and of “The Blood Quilt,” by Katori Hall. Ms. Winfrey opted not to pursue either project; the producer who works with her, Scott Sanders, said, “I have another idea for her, but I’m waiting.”
Ms. Winfrey, who became famous as a talk-show host, has acted repeatedly in film and on television, and she currently has two projects in the works: She is planning to star in “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” for HBO and to play a recurring role on “Greenleaf” for her cable television channel, OWN.
But Broadway is especially demanding for someone with a complicated schedule — it would require a commitment of about 16 weeks, and, obviously, a temporary move to New York. (Ms. Winfrey’s primary residence is in California.) Her favorite play is “Fences,” by August Wilson, but she said her television workload prevented her from joining the last Broadway revival.
“The appeal would be that there would be a story so compelling and so moving that I would want to experience, share and offer that story on a nightly basis — that’s what it would take for me,” she said. “A couple of times I’ve been in readings, and I’ve said: ‘Do I really want to say these words? Are these words so moving and so necessary that I feel I will come across the country and give up my dogs and relocate to go onstage every night to say these words?’ I haven’t found those words yet.”
The only thing she is sure about is that her Broadway debut, should it ever happen, would be in a play, not a musical. “That I know for sure,” she said. “I can’t sing.” (Of course, that didn’t stop her on Tuesday night from joining along with the songs to the musical, but quietly.)
For Ms. Winfrey, the story of “The Color Purple,” about a young woman named Celie who is raped in her childhood home and bears children who are taken away, has long had deep personal resonance.
“Most people know I was raped at 9, and I was consistently molested up until the age of 14, and had a child, who then died, as result of those molestations,” Ms. Winfrey said. “So when I read that story, it’s the first time it even occurred to me that that was happening to someone else.”
Ms. Winfrey had been working as a TV anchor in Baltimore when she heard about the novel, which was written by Alice Walker and won a Pulitzer in 1983, viaa review in The New York Times. She loved the book and was eager to be a part of the film, but she had given up any hope of being cast. Then Quincy Jones spotted her on television (by that time, she had moved to Chicago) and suggested Steven Spielberg consider her; she wound up getting an Oscar nomination in 1986 for her supporting role as Sofia, a woman who resists abuse by her husband.
“I never wanted anything in my life more than I wanted that role, and I have not wanted anything as much since,” she said.
Two decades later, she was a producer of the original musical. (“I said, ‘That’s the last story you can turn into a musical,’ but then I read it, and felt, well, maybe that can happen.”) It opened on Broadway in 2005. She put up $1 million of the $11 million capitalization, allowed her name to be on the marquee and heavily promoted the show; this time, she is again one of the producers, albeit with a lower-key role.
“It always feels like a full-circle moment for me, every time I see it,” she said. “It has deep, deep, deep, deep, deep meaning.”
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
