When Scott Sanders set his mind to staging The Color Purple, he had never produced a Broadway musical. His experience was limited to one-person events, such as Dame Edna.

In nothing like an overnight success story, he was flying to Chicago less than a decade later, meeting with Oprah Winfrey and putting her name above the title.

That was a feat, but it was nothing compared to the way the show changed the complexion of Broadway audiences.

It was 1997 and Sanders was running Mandalay Television in Los Angeles when he began pursuing what became an obsession. His boss, Peter Guber, had been the executive producer on the 1985 film of Alice Walker's novel, but Guber was more of a connector than a reason for the choice of source material. For Sanders, the trail began in high school in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"It was the first year of desegregation and busing in Pinellas County and I went to a largely black high school," he says. "The city was fairly divided between the north side and the south side, and up until then I hadn't gone to school with any black kids. It was a really wonderful experience to be exposed to black culture during that time."

After college, he moved to New York, working as a talent coordinator at Radio City Music Hall. He developed a live concert program there, and suddenly he was mingling with Diana Ross, the Commodores, Marvin Gaye.

"I found myself just instinctively drawn to black music," he says.

And he had fallen for Walker's story of Celie, a young black woman in the 1930s South, valued by almost no one, including herself, except for her sister and, eventually, the independent juke joint singer who starts her down a road to self-determination.

"It wasn't like I was saying, 'Oh, I really want to produce a Broadway musical, what should that be?' " he points out. "I really have always felt that Celie is a remarkable woman and she has all these things that happen to her in her childhood and yet she is able to get up every day and put one foot in front of another and continue to move forward and not only to blossom herself as a woman, but really to generously give to all the people around her."

Although it already had become a legendary novel and prize-winning film, he felt it merited another incarnation.

But how could a young white man tell the story of a black woman 30 years before his birth?

"I thought, I've never done a Broadway musical before. I thought, I'm a white guy and this is an African-American story," he acknowledges. "But I also knew that I held the story and Alice's characters with such reverence that I never doubted my motivation or my intention or my commitment, if I did do it, that I would give it a level of authenticity."

First, he had to convince Alice Walker to give him the rights to her story. Guber made the introduction for him, and Sanders flew to her home in Berkeley.

"I told her why I wanted to do this, that I felt the story had music in its soul, and that I felt The Color Purple could be an African-American Fiddler on the Roof," he recalls.

Still, it was a big moment.

"By the time I walked into Alice's house in 1997, I had worked with huge Hollywood stars and music stars and I'm not easily intimidated. But walking into Alice Walker's house and knowing she had created and written The Color Purple, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, I was intimidated.

"And she's so quiet. I had no idea what she was thinking. She listened, and she nodded, and she was taking it in, and then, at the end, very Yoda-like, she said, 'No, I don't think so.' "

Sanders went home disappointed, but unbowed. He followed up with Walker, inviting her to New York for a week of Broadway shows and more sales pitch. He saved his biggest splash for a "small dinner party" of 30 to 40 people on a yacht circling Manhattan, with guests including Lincoln Center producer Bernard Gersten, Pace Theatricals leader Scott Zeiger and Diana Ross and her daughters.

The last night of her trip, Sanders joined Walker, her nephew and his wife for dinner.

"I will never forget this because I'm sitting at the restaurant and she knows I'm expecting an answer at this point and she starts the conversation by asking her nephew and his wife what they think. And I thought, 'Oh my God, does everybody get a vote?'

"It was kind of like 'Bring me the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West and then you can go back to Kansas.' "

Sanders was in luck: The nephew and wife liked the idea, and Walker was in.

Putting it together

Sanders spent the next eight years developing the musical. He assembled a diverse creative team, with Marsha Norman writing the script and an array of Hollywood pop composers contributing to the score.

For a director, he went to a Broadway newcomer, Chicagoan Gary Griffin. He pulled together his budget from a number of producers and, he swears, never considered asking Oprah Winfrey to contribute. His biggest dream, he says, was that maybe she'd plug his show on her show.

"I was in Oprah's studio two times over the eight years that I was developing the show," he says. "I was with Diana Ross once and I was with Queen Latifah once. With Diana Ross I was standing in the studio 15 feet away from her (Winfrey), and there was a part of me that wanted to go over and say, 'I'm also developing The Color Purple as a musical' and a little voice inside me just said, 'No, don't do that now, it's not time.' "

Walker had written Winfrey, letting her know about the musical, but didn't hear back.

Then Quincy Jones stepped in, asking to hear the score in February 2005 and offering to get involved. By that summer the group was in New York, going over rewrites, joined by Jones and Walker.

The opening had been pushed up to Nov. 1, after Mambo Kings suddenly closed, and a year's worth of marketing had to be done in a few weeks. So a small group of magazine editors were invited to sit in on rehearsal in order to plan advance features. One of them was particularly well-connected.

"I'm assuming that O Magazine doesn't cover Broadway very much, but I wouldn't want there to be any disrespect by us not inviting O Magazine. Quincy said, 'Call Gayle King,'" Sanders says. "Now I'm probably the only American who in 2005 didn't know that Gayle King was Oprah's best friend."

King showed up but asked for an aisle seat and said she could only stay for Act I.

"We do the first part and lights go up and I go over thinking I'm going to say goodbye and she's crying and she says, 'I've just e-mailed my office, I'm staying for the whole thing, and oh, by the way, I just e-mailed Oprah and told her you're doing her proud,' " Sanders says.

On the Fourth of July, he ran into King. She asked about investors and was told they were all lined up.

"I said, 'Look, if somebody falls out, I'll let you know. Is it somebody really important to you?' " he recalls. "And she said, it's Oprah."

The next day Winfrey called him, which for him was "like walking down the beach and you find a bottle and you pull out a cork and the genie says, 'What wish do you want me to grant?' "

She invited him to come to Chicago a week later and Sanders was overcome with joy, until he realized that Winfrey thought she was a producer on the show.

"I said, 'I don't need your money,' " he says.

"And she said, 'Well, you're the first person who's ever said that to me.' "

He offered to cut back the dollar amounts on investors to make room for her, but Winfrey said she wouldn't barge in like that. So Sanders came up with the idea that made his show an enormous success: "Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple."

As several authors can attest, when Winfrey gets involved, the game changes. She popped out of a freight elevator at rehearsal and people erupted in tears and screams. She did David Letterman's show before opening night to promote it. She put together a guest list for opening night that turned it into an Oscar-level red carpet.

Oprah alone, though, didn't make The Color Purple a unique sight on Broadway, with black audiences in the majority.

"We really did a lot of grassroots marketing initiatives and Web-based stuff," Sanders says.

The cast got on TV doing public service announcements for Black History Month. It went to perform in churches on Sundays. Ads were placed on black radio stations, which are usually ignored, and bought in The Daily News instead of The New York Times. Church groups came from hours away; an online cookbook featured recipes related to the show.

In less than a year, the show had recouped its investment, almost unheard of for a show that doesn't feature ABBA tunes. It grossed $105 million in New York alone.

"By the time we closed on Broadway, where we played to over a million people, I would say that probably 50 to 55 percent of them were African-Americans," Sanders says with pride. "We literally changed the entire demographic makeup of Broadway while we were there."

At every step of the process, powerful, famous people came aboard, most of them at their own instigation.

"There were so many of these twists and turns that were just sort of odd," Sanders says. "Alice would say that the ancestors were looking after the process."

The Color Purple

* When: Wednesday to Jan. 18

* Where: Buell Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex

* Tickets: $25 to $90; 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org

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