Igor Stravinsky / The Color Purple

On this day in classical music: Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Agon” received its premiere by the New York City Ballet in 1957. Choreographed by Georges Balanchine, “Agon” is a ballet for twelve dancers that features several movements based on 17th century French courtly dances. Although the ballet has no narrative, it combines groups of dancers in pairs, trios and quartets. The music is dramatically different from Stravinsky’s famous “Firebird,” “Petrouchka” and “The Rite of Spring.” By the 1950s, the composer had embraced serialism, elements of which give “Agon” a very contemporary sound. Watch Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell perform an excerpt from “Agon.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bx46l2gfZ0

On this day in the musical theatre: “The Color Purple” opened on Broadway in 2005. Based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a young black girl and the many struggles she faces in the American South, “The Color Purple” enjoyed a two year run and earned a Tony Award for La Chanze’s portrayal as Celie. Watch a promotional video for the national touring production of “The Color Purple.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frkg4pcEGXc

Musical musings: Time doesn’t just fly in the exhaustingly eventful world of “The Color Purple,” the musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel and film of the same title that opened last night at the Broadway Theater. It threatens to break the sound barrier. In faithfully adapting Ms. Walker’s incident-crammed 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner about Southern black women finding their inner warriors, the show’s creators have fashioned a bright, shiny and muscular storytelling machine that is above all built for speed. So much plot, so many years, so many characters to cover in less than three hours. Or, as one of the many vibrant heroines sings, prettily papering over a gap of eight years, “So many winters gray and summers blue.” From the brass-warmed opening bars of its eclectic overture, this musical has an on-your-mark, get-set quality that promises that pages will be flying off the calendar as if in a tornado. Watching this beat-the-clock production summons the frustrations of riding through a picturesque stretch of country in a supertrain like the TGV. The landscape looks seductively lush and varied; the local populace seems lively and inviting, like people you might want to know; you can even hear tantalizing snatches of folks singing in an intriguing idiom as they go about their work. But it all passes by in a watercolor blur. This show isn’t stiff and anemic like its chief musical competition this season, “The Woman in White” (another plot-crammed adaptation of a novel). But it never slows down long enough for you to embrace it. Would that “The Color Purple” did take time to stop and smell the lilacs. – Ben Brantley in The New York Times

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