Leslie Odom Jr. has been trying to get “Purlie Victorious” to Broadway for six years
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The night that he won his Tony Award for Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. knew what he wanted his next stage project to be — he just didn't expect it to take him years to get it to Broadway.
Now, six years later, Odom is finally getting his wish, bringing Ossie Davis' play Purlie Victorious back to the New York stage for the first time since the original production closed in 1962.
"In an interview the day after the Tony Awards in 2016, somebody asked me what I wanted to do next on Broadway," Odom tells EW. "I said, 'It would be nice to do Purlie Victorious.' I got on a phone call with my agent shortly after, and I was like, 'This piece hasn't been done. Surely somebody will take a meeting with us on this thing. It's the day after the Tony Awards, if not now, then when?'"
Marc J. Franklin Leslie Odom Jr. and the cast of 'Purlie Victorious'
But it wasn't as simple as Odom hoped. "We couldn't get a meeting," he continues. "We tried for a few years to get the meeting. The rights were being held by a different producer at the time in New York City, and he was holding the rights for somebody else that he thought wanted to do the show. My agent and I called once or twice a year every single year to see if he would reconsider. And he didn't. About 2020, there was a sunset on his holding the rights, and we started discussions with a different producer. It's taken all these years."
Odom, who is now in previews before the show opens Sept. 27 at the Music Box Theatre, fell in love with Davis' play about a Southern preacher trying to save his church and a family inheritance in high school. "This is one of those plays, as a young Black performer, that gets put into your hands when you're first starting," Odom explains of the play's particular legacy. "You're looking for monologues and you're looking for scenes to work on in class, Victorious is one of the 10 to 15 plays that is in your little library."
Marc J. Franklin Leslie Odom Jr. in 'Purlie Victorious'
But for so long, Odom has only ever read the play, not seen it brought to life on stage. And he yearned to rectify that. "Plays are meant to be seen and heard," he muses. "A play is not, in my opinion, in its intended format to be read only. At the very least, it's to be read aloud. They're meant to come to life, unlike a novel which happens in our imagination. We're supposed to see and hear these things. So when I read it as a young person, I didn't understand it the way that I do now. It's so funny and joyous and smart and emotional and everything that you could want in an evening."
Because of that, Odom had hoped to make this happen years ago, but he says that there's a certain sense of kismet to it finally coming back to Broadway in 2023. "Every day that I'm in the rehearsal room with this cast and this director at this time in the country, I get goosebumps. That's not something you manufacture. I'm getting the goosebumps because it feels like Purlie Victorious was waiting for such a time as this to make its grand return to the Great White Way in this historic theater."
"I'm excited to discover why it took years," he continues. "There's something that I believe is spiritual about those things. Hamilton, three years earlier or three years later, isn't the same show. If Hamilton comes out at the beginning of a Trump presidency, I think it has a different resonance and quite possibly doesn't do what it did. There was something about the summer of 2015 that was made for that show's maximum potential. When these things really work, there is a confluence of events universally that help trap that lightning in a bottle."
Marc J. Franklin Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young in 'Purlie Victorious'
Purlie Victorious follows its title character, traveling preacher Purlie Victorious Judson (Odom) as he returns to his small Georgia town with the goal of saving the community's church, Big Bethel. He also seeks to emancipate the cotton pickers working on Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee's (Jay O. Sanders) plantation. Purlie recruits Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara Young) to help him in his schemes and his attempts to secure an overdue inheritance from Cotchipee.
With its take on race in America, the play is at risk of finding itself in the virulent crosshairs of the latest wave of conservatives attempts to ban books and censor history. "Come see it while you can," Odom quips. "The way things are going, we're a few months away from this play being banned. But Ossie Davis is going to return in a shape that I think he'd be proud of, with this company led by the incomparable [director] Kenny Leon."
Marc J. Franklin The cast of 'Purlie Victorious'
For Odom, though race has informed all of his work, Purlie Victorious grapples with it in even more direct fashion than some of his previous projects. "It's foregrounded in my mind every single time [I work]," Odom says of race. "When you engage with the history of this country and what being Black has meant since 1619, slavery was for a people for forever. That being the story for how a great portion of my family began on this soil, I'm always in discussion with it. There's not a day in this country that I can forget that I'm a Black man."
Still, that doesn't mean the play is tragedy or trauma porn. In fact, Odom wants to be sure audiences know it's the opposite. "It's everything that I want in an evening of theater, whether I'm on stage or off," he says. "I want to have a foot-stomping good time, and I want to be moved."
Marc J. Franklin The cast of 'Purlie Victorious'
"Ossie Davis sat down to write a story about growing up in the segregated south in this rural town in Georgia," Odom. continues. "And he realized early on that it was just too painful to ask an audience to sit through. Right away it's this act of generosity because he wants you to meet these people that he loves so much and wants to bring you to his farm in Georgia, but he doesn't want it to be too painful for you to sit through. In his effort and his act of generosity for this imagined audience, we get to be the conduit of all that joy."
In his preparation for the play, Odom immersed himself in everything he could find about the original production, as well as the lives of writer-star Ossie Davis and his wife (who also starred alongside Davis in the 1961 play), Ruby Dee.
"I've devoured every single thing out there that the two of them were a part of in culture," he says. "They were real cultural ambassadors, not only for the Black community, but for American society. There's not really a landmark moment that you can look at for a few decades that they're not involved in — the March on Washington, Malcolm X is assassinated and his family calls Ozzie Davis to write the eulogy. These are foundational moments in American culture that these two are at the center at."
Marc J. Franklin 'Purlie Victorious'
Odom and his wife, Nicolette Robinson, who is also an actor, are ripe to emulate this power couple. She is not filling Dee's shoes as Odom's costar in the play, but Robinson is a producer. "I knew that I couldn't literally be in the audience and on stage at the same time," Odom explains of asking his wife to wear a producorial hat. "There's no one I trust more to give me feedback about the production as a whole."
Thought the show isn't even open yet, Odom is optimistic that this is only the beginning for his journey with the work. There is also a musical adaptation of the play, Purlie, which hit Broadway in 1970 that he is potentially interested in exploring. But if this is the right moment for Purlie Victorious, it's also the necessary starting point for any grander plan.
"We're at the beginning of a discussion to see what we do next with this property," Odom concludes. "We'll see if that's what we want to tackle next. But this felt right, going back to the original source material and revisiting it. I don't know what Mr. Davis would think, but I certainly like to think that he'd be proud of this production and he'd be happy to see it return to Broadway after 60 years. Whatever happens next, this is what needed to happen first."
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