The Color Purple glows at the Fox

Seems like it took me a full day to recover from the Theatre of the Stars’ opening-night presentation of the Tony-nominated The Color Purple at the Fox on Tuesday, so please forgive my tardiness. There was so much going on with this show — the backstory of the production, the curious nature of its adaptation book to movie to musical theater, you name it — I’m still a bit overwhelmed.

Still, this production, despite some obvious flaws, is one of those classic examples of something being bigger than the sum of its parts, and is a heckuva homecoming for a musical that received its world premiere at the Alliance back in 2004 before heading up to Broadway. (Check out Curt Holman’s review of that production). That’s just a slice of the show’s now-storied past, if you throw in the local angle of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book having been written by Georgia’s own Alice Walker along with Steven Spielberg’s earnest 1985 movie version.