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MINI REVIEWS
A star (*) denotes a show recommended by our critics.
Newly Reviewed
THE COLOR PURPLE
At the Kennedy Center Opera House through Aug. 9
Fantasia's performance is ample reason to go and find the joy in the more satiny moments of this syrupy, quite literal translation of Alice Walker's novel. The "American Idol" winner plays Celie, the brutally mistreated farm girl wrenched from her adoring sister, Nettie (LaToya London), by just about the orneriest varmint in all of musical theater-dom: the vile Mister (Rufus Bonds Jr.), a misery who imagines that it is within his purview to constantly blurt at the woman who washes his shirts and endures his "lovemaking" that she is downright ugly. Despite an excellent cast (Felicia P. Fields plays the unstoppable Sofia as if she were a bulldozer with a larynx), the mechanical libretto and the garden-variety tunes stingily hold Fantasia back. She does supply a thrilling rendition of Celie's breakout number late in Act 2, "I'm Here," but it's not the nuclear-level melodic moment that we're craving, or that the singer deserves.
-- Peter Marks
Friday at 7:30, Sunday at 1:30 (Fantasia will not appear during Sunday matinee performances) and 7:30, and Tuesday-Thursday at 7:30. 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600 or http:/
Continuing
BRAINPEOPLE
By Rorschach Theatre at the Davis Performing Arts Center, Georgetown University, through July 26
Some plays look just plain hard as you watch them being performed, and José Rivera's is one of them. The setting is a futuristic dystopia, the plot unfolds in real time during a 90-minute dinner party, and one of the guests suffers from a spectacular case of multiple personality disorder. It's a grim and quirky quest to bend time, as an adult orphan continues to grieve for her long-dead parents. The dinner's hostess, Mayannah (Regina Aquino), is a wealthy survivor of a society that's apparently under siege (the details are sketchy, but there is a curfew, with raids and sirens heard just outside); she has offered $20,000 to the strangers Rosemary (Monalisa Arias; the one with split personalities) and Ani (Amanda Thickpenny; comparatively mousy and heartbroken) if they can handle her meal all the way through dessert. The lucid ending doesn't entirely validate the foggy ride, though, which ultimately plays like a twisted tunnel of an orphaned girl's love.
