Celie, the central character in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, lives a life most folks would consider unendurable.

A poor black girl who grows up in Georgia in the early 1900s, she's still a young teenager when she gives birth to two babies fathered by the man she thinks is her father, babies he takes away right after they're born. She is traded, along with a cow, to a cruel widower with kids, a farmer who abuses her verbally and physically, a man so determined to deny Celie any joy that he hides years' worth of loving letters from the sister who left to work as a missionary in Africa.

Yet Celie does endure, finds love, reclaims her life and her family. Walker's powerful tale of trial and triumph has sparked the imaginations of uncounted readers, the millions who saw Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated 1985 film of The Color Purple -- and, since 2005, the nearly two million theatergoers who have gone on Celie's journey in its newest form as a Broadway musical.

That musical will finally land in South Florida on Tuesday for a six-day, eight-performance run at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

For producer Scott Sanders, getting The Color Purple from the page to the stage was a labor of love that took years.

``When I read the book, I was so moved by Celie,'' says Sanders, who attended a majority black high school in St. Petersburg. ``I couldn't believe she could get up every day and just keep going. I was so moved by her spirit.''

First, he had to convince Walker that a musical based on her beloved book was a good idea. But when he met with her at her home in Berkeley, she wasn't exactly enthusiastic.

``She was quiet and reserved. She gave me no feedback. She said, `You seem like a nice man, but no.' I was disappointed, but then I thought, `OK, Scott. You shouldn't be able to walk in and get an OK in half an hour.' This is a story people read and re-read. I've heard women, including Oprah Winfrey [who got an Oscar nomination for playing Sofia in the movie and became an over-the-title producer of the musical], say that The Color Purple changed their lives,'' he says.

Eventually, the music and theater producer convinced Walker to visit him in New York, where they could see some Broadway shows together, and she could question theater professionals and stars who had worked with him. She then gave her blessing, but Sanders took his mission so seriously that he offered to abandon the project if she didn't think it did her novel justice.

TWO-YEAR SEARCH

He spent two years considering songs from potential composers, finally settling on the team of Allee Willis (who co-wrote Boogie Wonderland and September with Earth, Wind and Fire), Brenda Russell (Piano in the Dark) and Stephen Bray (Express Yourself and Into the Groove). For the major task of transforming Walker's novel into something that would work as musical theater, he picked Pulitzer winner Marsha Norman.

Norman had long felt a connection to Walker's novel; the women had both won their Pulitzers in 1983, Walker for The Color Purple, Norman for her play 'night, Mother. Norman had met with Spielberg to discuss writing the screenplay, but that discussion went nowhere. Years later, she delivered a Color Purple that is true musical theater yet closer in a number of ways to Walker's novel than the film was.

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