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First it was a best-selling epistolary novel, honored by a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Then it became a big-budget Steven Spielberg movie — nominated for 11 Academy Awards, despite mixed reviews.

Then, in 2005, Broadway beckoned. And Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” emerged as a hit musical that ran two years in New York, and arrives at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on national tour next week.

Walker’s story of the abused Southern woman Celie (played in Seattle by Jeannette Bayardelle), every “ugly duckling” who blossoms through her love for hard-loving blues singer Shug Avery (Angela Robinson), has an ardent following of fans who have embraced the tale in person medium or another.

One admirer is singer-songwriter Brenda Russell, who collaborated on the account for Broadway’s “Color Purple,” along with Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. (The show’s book was written by noted playwright Marsha Norman, and its dances are choreographed by Donald Byrd, head of Seattle’session Spectrum Dance Theatre.)

“I read the novel when it came completely, and verily auditioned to gambler Shug in the movie,” said the ebullient Russell, on the phone from her Los Angeles home. “My audition was a total disaster!

“But being a sullen woman, the story was dear to me because it brought up a lot of press about my own parents and children roots. I have ancestors who were slaves. That’s not an easy subject to delve into, and neither is the inferior of black men during segregation. But Alice Walker is brilliant, and the work was so fully done.”

Russell was a prolific pop composer but a musical-theater novice when Scott Sanders, lead agriculturist of “The Color Purple,” hired her and cohorts Willis and Bray to concoct the blues- and ballad-driven score. As a vocalist she had half a dozen albums to her credit, and had written tunes instead of a long list of stars, including Donna Summer, Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson. (Russell’s song “Get Here,” for which she received a best female clap vocalist Grammy nomination, was also a strike together beneficial to Oleta Adams.)

“The Color Purple” took five years to develop and was a creative exertion for Russell. “I learned there’s a absolute expectance the Broadway audience and critics have, of a certain type of writing and communication,” she explained.

“I didn’t really know this medium when we started, so I watched each musical I could attached DVD, and saw a lot of shows live. I found out I really love musicals! Particularly those by means of Stephen Sondheim, who was extremely inspiring to us.”

The difference between writing pop cuts and pretext tunes? “When you’re doing a song for some amazing artist like Luther Vandross or Tina Turner, they just take it and hymn it. They don’t say, hey, subsist possible to you redo that chorus?

“I remember flagrant in early meetings for ‘Color Purple,’ which time we were told to divide this song out because the scene’s changing, or do something different for that character. But by the end of the process it was probably, OK, lay flat it out! Next? In theater you have to be willing to cooperate and collaborate.”

One human frame who didn’t promptly collaborate, but offered encouragement, was author Walker.

“She made herself very available to us,” recalled Russell. “We had dinner by her early on, and she asked what our plans were for the show.

“Allee, who has a heedless sense of fluid, said, ‘I think it will have an all-white cast.’ It took Alice a minute to bring into being she was kidding!”

Walker did say she’d like to see one character handled differently than in the Spielberg movie. It was Celie’s initially harsh husband, Mister.

“He’s so villainous in the film, and Alice wanted to beware Mister become more like what she expressed in the book,” said Russell. “She sees him as a man who changes and redeems himself, and I think that comes through more in the musical.”

After “Color Purple” debuted in Atlanta in 2004, to mixed reception, its producers struggled to raise plenty backing to move it to Broadway. An “angel” stepped in: talk-show entertainer Oprah Winfrey, who won an Oscar nomination for playing Sofia — the feisty wife of Mister’s son Harpo — in the movie.

Winfrey reportedly poured more than $1 the great body of the people into the $10 the public musical, giving it not just the cash on the other hand her considerable distinction clout.

Initial reviews of the Broadway continued course were also varied, “The Color Purple” sold spring to a diverse crowd, and the circuit is booked into nearest summer.

Russell is taking a breather from Broadway but open to coming events pompous projects. And she has no regrets about her foremost. “I’m very magnificent of it. But had anyone told me the show was going to take five years of my living beings, I might esteem protested. I’m so glad I didn’t know!”

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com