'Color Purple' took a long road to the Academy

The Broadway know-it-alls told Scott Sanders that a musical of Alice Walker's beloved novel

The Color Purple

would never see the color green. Forget it, they said. You can't raise the money. Black themes don't pay on Broadway. You won't even get a theater for it.

Sanders never listened. He was too busy listening to the book. When he read it, he heard music - the music of the American rural South, of a black experience, of the theater. The sort of music that, taken together, found its way onto the Broadway stage of

The Color Purple

, whose first national tour arrives Tuesday at the Academy of Music and stays through July 13.

"The story has music in its soul," Sanders says of Walker's hard-knuckle Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel about two black sisters who grow up in ramshackle Southern poverty early in the last century. "Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones took us there musically, in several moments," he says of

The Color Purple's

1985 film version, "but I really felt that the story and the messages of those characters lent themselves musically to a stage adaptation."

It took Sanders, 51, eight years to get from his first phone calls on the idea, past all the naysayers, to opening night on Broadway Dec. 1, 2005 - "the longest project I've ever worked on in my whole life."

Initially, Sanders had to convince Walker it could work. Finally, he says, "I looked her in the eye and said, 'If I don't make you happy with this, I won't put it on stage.' "

It wasn't until the show was loading into the Broadway Theatre that Oprah Winfrey, who had played a role in the film, called to say she was hearing great buzz, and that she would give it her support. She invested, and agreed to Sanders' suggestion that she become

The Color Purple's

marquee name as a producer. Other producers include all-round musician Quincy Jones, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and investment banker Roy Furman.

After 96 dizzying months of Sanders' leadership, it took

The Color Purple

only 11 months to recoup its $11 million investment - lightning speed on big-bucks Broadway, where popular musicals can take years to become profitable ones. By the time it closed in February after 910 Broadway performances,

The Color Purple

had grossed $103 million, equivalent to a successful movie. Already, the national tour has brought in more than $50 million.

All this is great for a producer - Sanders is what Broadway nowadays calls a lead producer because he's instrumental in every step of decision-making, from assembling a creative team, rustling up the cash, negotiating for the theater, overseeing all the marketing, and even steering the post-Broadway tour. The lead theatrical producer, Sanders says, is basically a single person who performs the same functions as an entire Hollywood studio - and he should know.

His production company, based in New York with a film division on Disney's Burbank lot, has a "first-look" deal with Disney, and Sanders has been the head of TV's Mandalay Entertainment (

Young Americans

,

Cupid

and others), a record producer (Queen Latifah), and a Broadway producer (

The Color Purple

is his first musical).

It would be inaccurate, and probably an insult, to imply that profit was Sanders' chief incentive in going after

The Color Purple

; profit is an iffy idea on Broadway and producers, like everyone else in the theater, have artistic visions that drive them - especially lead producers who develop their own ideas.

"No one thought we'd make a nickel off of it, including me. I was producing television as a day job, assuming

that

was how I was going to pay my bills. I was thinking of the project creatively - and perhaps naively as to the ease or lack thereof to actually make it happen. If I knew when I started that it would be an eight-year project, I probably wouldn't have done it, so my naivete served me well."

It took Sanders two years just to assemble a creative team; he says he was proud to have three women and two African Americans as authors of a play whose themes focus on two black women.

He also is proud of the way

The Color Purple

has diversified Broadway's audience. The show's audience was normally 50 percent to 60 percent African American, says Sanders, who is white, "and it's blown all the numbers out of the water, because it has a very strong resonance with women and with African Americans. After we opened, the African American audience on Broadway was up substantially," largely attributable to

The Color Purple.

In fact, the last demographic report by the Broadway League - producers who also run tonight's Tony Awards show - is for the 2006-2007 season, when

The Color Purple

was in its second year. That season, 26 percent of Broadway's theatergoers were nonwhite, the highest proportion in recorded history. No figures have been released for this Broadway season, in which a number of producers have been keen to attract diverse audiences, particularly African Americans.

"Because I sort of birthed this," Sanders says, "I was very hands-on, sometimes to the chagrin of my creative team. This was a vision and a passion I had, and I'd made a promise to Alice Walker that it would work. The story has great emotional and spiritual connection to many people, and I certainly wasn't going to be the guy to screw it up.

"It's the hardest thing I've ever done," says the man who orchestrated the revival of Radio City Music Hall in 1979, from a failing old theater into a vibrant American showplace, and who has now set about producing a musical based on the life of legendary magician Harry Houdini.

"I'm hoping I can hold on to some of the idealistic parts of myself as I do the next one," he says. "So many people told me I could never do this one, and look what happened. Having a friendship and relationship with Oprah Winfrey has shown me: Dream big."