‘The Color Purple’ Musical Showcases Halle Bailey and Fantasia Barrino in Bold First Trailer (Video)
thewrap.comthis year’s CinemaCon that director Blitz Bazawule’s musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel is “not your Mama’s ‘Color Purple’,” and based on the first trailer, she’s right.
Warner Bros. released the first trailer today, and between cinematographer Dan Laustsen’s cinematography and Fantasia Barrino’s soaring vocals, there’s enough packed into two minutes to bring out all the emotions.Like Walker’s groundbreaking 1982 novel on which the musical is based, this feature follows Celie (Barrino as an adult and Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a child), a Black woman struggling to survive in the South during the 1900s.
We see several sequences similar to what director Steven Spielberg had in his own adaptation of Walker’s book, released to theaters in 1985, including scenes of young Celie and her sister, Nettie (played by “Little Mermaid” star Halle Bailey as a teen) sitting in a tree, and the first meeting between Celie and her husband, referred to only as Mister (played by Colman Domingo).
Winfrey, who acted in Spielberg’s original feature and is a producer on this, mentioned during CinemaCon that the film deals in “fantastical realism” and that’s certainly evident in the bright, colorful sequences, including one of Taraji P.
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