Redemption, via ‘Purple’s’ prose

“The Color Purple,” Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, is all about liberating black female voices from the shackles of racial and gender oppression. And the good news about the otherwise forgettable touring Broadway musical version, which opened Sunday at the Ahmanson Theatre, is that it provides an opportunity for the gospel recording artist Jeannette Bayardelle to showcase her sumptuous, tidal-wave vocals as Celie. For those who haven’t read the book or seen Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie, Celie is the young Job-like protagonist who endures every imaginable hardship on her way to the kind of assured spiritual enlightenment that Oprah Winfrey has made her lucrative stock in trade.

Winfrey, of course, is not just one of the show’s producers but a crucial advertising presence (“Oprah Winfrey presents” is part of the billing). Let’s just hope that no one from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was in attendance on opening night. The spectacle at the Ahmanson would no doubt have been even more rattling than the latest poll numbers coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire. If Winfrey’s name can help turn this overstuffed mediocrity into a sea-to-shining-sea blockbuster, then President Obama might not be as far-fetched a notion as it appeared a few weeks ago.

In many ways, “The Color Purple” is an appropriate way to bring this annus horribilis of the American musical to a close. The show, which premiered on Broadway in 2005, was redeemed from the start by the glorious female performers who graced its cast. And this year’s musical clunkers -- too numerous to mention -- also were made tolerable by the quality of acting and singing, which invariably outstripped the writing and composing that gave rise to them.

The ensemble at the Ahmanson is hardly stellar across the board, though fans of Destiny’s Child will be excited to learn that Michelle Williams plays Shug Avery, the honky-tonk singer whom everyone, including Celie, is more than a little bewitched by. Shug, short for “sugar,” is a role that’s intended to electrify. A strutting, simmering vamp, the woman is like a spritz of cheap perfume that ensnares its amorous prey through obviousness rather than stealth.

Williams, a lithe presence with a medium-sized R&B; voice, handles the demands of the accessible score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, which mixes and matches styles of African American music in an easy-listening mode. But the scenes with Shug never detonate the way you’d hope, and the character’s irresistible charm is a narrative given, rather than a theatrical fact.

What prevents “The Color Purple” from being the musical for the ages that it clearly would like to be, however, is Marsha Norman’s book, which distills the novel’s busy plot into a two-act structure that becomes a real slog in the second half.

How to begin recapping a tale so exhaustingly eventful that Shakespeare and Dickens might throw up white flags? Early on, when we encounter Celie as a 14-year-old girl living in Georgia in the early years of the 20th century, she’s pregnant by the man she thinks is her father (Quentin Earl Darrington). Forced to give up her second baby by him, she’s eventually palmed off on Mister (Rufus Bonds Jr.), an abusive tyrant who’d rather take her younger and supposedly prettier sister, Nettie (who’s played with impressive restraint by “American Idol” alum LaToya London).

Celie’s new life as the caretaker of Mister’s house and children is one of drudgery compounded by misery. And the bad dream only gets worse after Mister unsuccessfully tries to have his way with Nettie and end up throwing Celie’s dignified sister off his property, where she has sought sanctuary from her rapist father.

The rest of the epic revolves around Celie’s rising sense of independent womanhood, a slow and painful dawning of consciousness that’s nurtured by the strong female presences around her, excluding, of course, the chorus of busybody church ladies.

Sofia (Felicia P. Fields reprising her Tony-nominated performance in the role Winfrey took on in the film) is a plus-size lesson in the enormous strength that resides in a woman who has decided not to allow herself to be bullied by men anymore. When Sofia lustily walks onstage, her astonishingly full-figured character fleshed out even more with pregnancy, Celie can hardly believe her eyes. She’s never seen anything this big and bold and unbowed before.

Shug’s entrance wakes Celie to her own sensuality, even if the musical tones down the lesbian theme of Walker’s novel. (Norman’s adaptation has all the subtlety of a pop-up book, but on this subject alone it proves discreet.) It is through the appreciative attention of this erotic dynamo that Celia discovers the possibility of her own beauty and immanent godliness. And naturally she’s rewarded for this psychological leap with the news that her sister and two babies aren’t dead after all but are living in Africa, to which the musical eventually ventures off with hokey “Lion King” theatrics.

The novel contains all this sensational incident and pop-religious insight more comfortably than the theatrical production. There’s something old-fashioned about literalizing it onstage -- the shrieks and howls are a throwback to early melodrama, and director Gary Griffin allows the story to unfold as though a piano man were providing suspenseful accompaniment.

Were it not for the harsh historical reality of what blacks endured in the Jim Crow South, the story line would be completely preposterous as opposed to only partially so. But “The Color Purple” is not just a tale, it’s a contemporary myth. (The purple-hued scenic background, designed by John Lee Beatty and lighted by Brian MacDevitt, lends an aura of spiritual reverence.) And audiences, particularly those in the expansive Oprah Winfrey demographic, have found in it a source of hope, healing and renewal.

There’s no arguing with that, though one wishes the creators would have aimed higher artistically. The show’s allergy to sophistication doesn’t broaden its appeal -- it limits it. Worse, it blunts the cumulative emotional effect, which should be the great leveler, joining high-, middle- and lowbrows in a flood of cathartic tears.

But there’s no denying the crushing force of Celie’s redemptive journey when Bayardelle opens her mouth and lets loose those rapturous blues. This isn’t so much a great musical theater performance as a virtuosic concert turn infused with genuine poignancy. But the lush sound could transform a hardened agnostic into the most fervent believer.

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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‘The Color Purple’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 9

Price: $30 to $150

Contact: (213) 628-2772; for groups: (213) 972-7231; www.ahmansontheatre.org

Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes