The Mercury Theater is "The Color Purple"

"The Color Purple" (click here to watch the video)

In Big-hearted 'Color Purple' has Mercury bursting at the seams, writer Chris Jones speaks honestly and delivers a point that came to mind for me, as I read his piece [emphasis, added]:

Many an experienced New York producer has taken a look at the Mercury Theater, located in the heart of Chicago's Southport Avenue corridor but bereft of fly space and wing space, and declared it fit only for cabarets and diminutive revues. L. Walter Stearns, who owns, operates and directs at the joint, hasn't listened and just poured new money into the sound system. The result is the thrilling wall of harmonic sound from a mostly Equity company of African-American actors that flows out in great emotional waves in the first made-in-Chicago production of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

It is a genuinely eye-popping achievement. Stearns' "Color Purple" features a company of 16, which is about half the size of the 2005 Broadway original, but these actors are performing in a theater about a tenth of the size of the Cadillac Palace, where this title last played in Chicago (at much higher prices). It's hard to overstate the advantage of this intimacy for a piece that tells such a personal story.

Not all theater venues have equal fortunes:  Some have more, others have less.  But clearly this is not an issue for the Mercury Theater.

(image credit)

What Jones writes about reminds me of this quote, by tennis legend Arthur Ashe, I believe.  It's a tenet of my Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm.