The New Yorker:

Alice Walker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Color Purple,” was born on this day in 1944. A musical adaptation of the book opened on Broadway in 2005, and was revived in 2015. Read about John Doyle’s fresh and vital revival of “The Color Purple,” from 2015.

By Hilton Als 

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals. This is not surprising. American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations—the fantasy of freedom and resolve—and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women’s lives. Still, some politically committed theatre artists have fought to bring different kinds of stories to the musical form, and to liberate black female stars from the bondage of playing “black,” rather than embodying a complete character. Diahann Carroll gave it her all as Barbara Woodruff, a model whose race was not a plot point, in Richard Rodgers’s 1962 piece, “No Strings.” But that show was unusual, and remains so. In 1967, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jules Styne poured their liberal hipness and guilt into “Hallelujah, Baby!,” which tells the story of Georgina (played, in the original production, by Leslie Uggams, who won a Tony for her performance). Georgina is a kind of archetype: a young indomitable black woman who survives the Great Depression, the Second World War, and show-biz racism without aging or relinquishing her dream of becoming a star. When Uggams sang “Being Good Isn’t Good Enough,” at the end of the first act, she knew what she was talking about—she was, after all, a black actress trying to make it on Broadway in the sixties:

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