Entertainment

Scott Sanders missed Oprah Winfrey's first phone call because he was in the shower. He was even more surprised shortly afterward when she offered him a million bucks.

And the money wasn't even the thing he was most excited about. Ms. Winfrey's help might enable him to fulfill, he hoped, a long-held dream to bring a new black audience to Broadway.

The stage, music and TV producer had been working for years to develop a musical version of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, which the Dallas Summer Musicals opens today as this year's State Fair musical. Of course, the book was a property dear to the TV megastar's heart, since the 1985 movie adaptation by Steven Spielberg gave Ms. Winfrey her national breakout role and won her an Oscar nomination.

Mr. Winfrey's associate Gayle King had already checked out the Color Purple musical before the star called Mr. Sanders. Ms. King had slipped into a workshop of the show and stayed much longer than she had planned. When she left, she told Mr. Sanders she was writing her friend Oprah a note telling her she would be pleased with the musical.

"The best I could hope for was that Oprah might come to the show on opening night," Mr. Sanders says.

A short time later, Ms. King called Mr. Sanders to tell him she had a friend who wanted to invest in the show, and he replied that he really had all the money he needed.

"She said, 'Well, it's Oprah,' " Mr. Sanders says, "and that was that."

The next day he found that phone message upon getting out of the shower. When Ms. Winfrey eventually called him back, he told her that it would be wonderful if she could do for the theater what she has been doing for books and authors.

Mr. Scott, amazed that Ms. Winfrey wanted to invest such a substantial sum in the show, had to do a work-around.

"This was a first – to call your Broadway backers and, without telling them why, let them know we needed less money from them," he says.

Mr. Sanders says he really thought he had died and gone to heaven when Ms. Winfrey asked when she could put the performers on the show. Then she suggested they surprise the cast by filming a run-through.

"She flew the plane in, and the only other person I told was Gary Griffin," the show's director, Mr. Sanders recalls.

When the star's involvement became public, everyone immediately recognized what a difference it could make for a show that had received only lukewarm notices during its previous Atlanta tryout.

"I had been hoping we could attract a whole new audience to the theater. For all Broadway shows combined, only 3.8 percent of audience members were African-American," Mr. Sanders says. "I was hoping we could exceed that three- or fourfold. The wonderful thing is that after we opened, our audience was 50-50, black and white. So many people – including Fantasia, who later starred in the show on Broadway – told us they had never been to a Broadway show in their lives."

As a white guy from Florida, Mr. Sanders initially had a hard time convincing Ms. Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, that The Color Purple could be effective as a song-and-dance show.

The producer got his start by bringing that New York institution, Radio City Music Hall, back from the brink and making it thrive again. He produced TV series like the well-reviewed but ill-fated Cupid, won a Grammy nomination for Queen Latifah's jazz album and won a Tony Award for Elaine Stritch's one-woman show. But putting together a huge project like The Color Purple from scratch was something else.

Still, he was convinced that the novel would make an inspirational stage show and its heroine, Celie, an appealing protagonist.

The first time Mr. Sanders made a pitch to Ms. Walker, she told him he had made a nice presentation – but no. He continued to woo her by talking about the elements of the book that would be more effective onstage than they had been on film.

"I think Alice was impressed with the fact that I had such a great respect for the book and its characters," Mr. Sanders said. "I thought that, like Fiddler on the Roof, it followed a community over a long period of time. And the era when it was set, 1909 to 1949, offered such a great variety of musical styles for the composers to draw from."

Once the novelist had given her OK, Mr. Sanders had to select a librettist – playwright Marsha Norman – and choose a team of composers who had written hits for groups such as Earth, Wind & Fire. The Color Purple resembles other recent musicals, like Wicked, in having the producer as the driving force behind the idea.

Ms. Winfrey's interest in the musical came very late in its development. Nevertheless, it was Mr. Sanders who insisted that the show's official title became Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple – in line with some of the star's other projects.

"She asked me, 'Are you sure?' And I was," Mr. Sanders says. "She has been a very active partner. She's seen the show at least two dozen times."

There must have been a certain satisfaction for Ms. Winfrey in all of this. Back when the movie came out, her Chicago-based interview show was just about to go into national syndication. She reportedly begged director Steven Spielberg to put her name on the show's poster, to no avail.

Now her name isn't just on the poster of The Color Purple –it leads the marquee.