The Color Purple took its time -- 27 years, to be exact -- making the journey from the pages of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the stage of Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Its fleeting run will end on Sunday, but as the cheering crowd affirmed at Tuesday's opening, the musical treatment of one woman's harrowing story is abundantly worth the wait.

Walker's slice of black history swirls around Celie (Kenita R. Miller), who first appears as a 14-year-old about to deliver her second baby by the brutal man she calls Pa (Horace V. Rogers). By the time The Color Purple ends, almost three hours and 40 years later, Celie has become a person of self-reliant strength, a once-lonely woman now surrounded by love.

But getting from A to B, from 1909 to 1949, from victim to victor? That's the remarkable, engrossing journey The Color Purple offers its audience.

In transforming Walker's novel into theater, script writer Marsha Norman and composer-lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray haven't toned down or sanitized Celie's trials.

She is given in marriage to Mister (Rufus Bonds Jr.), a widower with four unruly children, a man who beats her, sexually uses her and openly disdains her as ``ugly.'' For decades, she is cut off from any contact with her beloved younger sister Nettie (the radiant ex-American Idol finalist, La Toya London, who really can act). And though Celie eventually does find love, that lover proves as unreliable as she is intoxicating.

Under Gary Griffin's direction, the story absolutely works as theater, though its one misstep is a detour to Nettie's years with missionaries in Africa. Though the sequence fills in a few key plot points, it looks more like a pretty-yet-jolting detour to a theme park.

Russell, Willis and Bray have crafted a score that ranges from the rousing double-entendre number Push Da Button (delivered with knockout assurance by the irresistible Angela Robinson as sultry singer Shug Avery) to the praise-filled church song Mysterious Ways to Celie's life-affirming final solo, I'm Here. Their collection of musical theater songs serves the story while artfully incorporating the myriad musical styles that inspired them. Choreographer Donald Byrd keeps the cast jumping from moved-by-the-spirit church dancing to down-and-dirty juke joint revelry.

John Lee Beatty's lovely folk-art set, Paul Tazewell's period-traversing costumes and Brian MacDevitt's graceful lighting create a world inhabited by a powerhouse touring company.

Miller anchors the cast as Celie, a tiny woman with an enormous heart and even bigger voice. Felicia P. Fields, a Tony Award nominee for her performance as the strong-willed Sofia, has burnished the role to a brilliant amalgam of comedy, big-gal sexiness and heartbreak. Though the show's men -- Bonds' Mister, Rogers' Pa, Adam Wade's Ol' Mister, even Stu James' generally sweet Harpo -- too often spell trouble in the woman-centric world of The Color Purple, all are persuasively played.

The Color Purple is doing a booming business at the Arsht, so much so that the run is nearly sold out. But the good news is that the show is coming back to South Florida in April for a two-week run at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. See it now or see it then, but know that this fine production is worth seeing.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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