NEW YORK - We arrive in pairs and quartets, small groups and hordes. In bright dresses, shawls and strappy sandals, we emerge from taxis and chartered buses into the blessedly temperate summer night.

We have come to see the brightest light on Broadway, the toast of the town, in a role she was born to play. And no one could have been more eager to see Fantasia Barrino as Celie in "The Color Purple" than those of us from her home state.

Fantasia's fellow Tar Heels watched her compete on "American Idol" -- cheered for her, voted for her, celebrated her win -- but never really thought she'd make it to the pinnacle of American theater, much less dazzle a city, critics and theatergoers alike. Yet here we are, waiting to see if this Southern gal, who gave us chills when she sat on the "American Idol" stage floor and sang "Summertime," will make us proud.

Somehow in all the people, North Carolinians manage to find other North Carolinians, like Mildred Brown, who planned a sister weekend in the Big Apple with her three sisters, all of them originally from Kinston.

"We wanted to see 'The Color Purple,' " says Brown, who lives in Raleigh, "and we wanted to see it while Fantasia was in it."

So have a lot of other people. Ticket sales had begun to sag in the months after the departure of the show's original star, Tony Award winner LaChanze. But since Fantasia's arrival in April, sales have gone through the roof. One week in June, more than a $1 million in tickets were sold, bringing the musical's popularity back to its early days.

"The Color Purple" arrived in 1982 as a groundbreaking novel by Alice Walker, who let out the dirty secret that black men -- fathers, brothers and lovers -- often mistreat the women they should protect. The book, which unfolds in letters to God by a woman named Celie, delivers a powerful lesson: The human spirit triumphs over and over again.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and Steven Spielberg turned it into a movie, which was filmed in Union and Anson counties in North Carolina. Whoopi Goldberg played Celie and won an Oscar nomination, as did Margaret Avery as Shug and Oprah Winfrey, in her movie debut, as Sofia.

The movie brought home the message that God didn't make ugly -- only humans do that -- and he wants us to pay attention to the beauty in the world. As Shug tells Celie, "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." Some of us loved the line so much that we bought greeting cards featuring a few blades of green grass, a brush stroke of purple and those very words.

When Winfrey started talking about turning the story into a musical, Walker had to be persuaded. Among playwright Marsha Norman and songwriters Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, the case was made, and LaChanze, a Broadway veteran, made it sing.

The announcement that Fantasia would step into the role drew skepticism. Her acting experience included little besides playing herself in a TV movie based on her memoir, "Life Is Not a Fairy Tale."

But Fantasia has a voice plus a story that's not so different from Celie's. She has said that she can barely read or write and that in her native High Point, she was physically and emotionally abused by her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child.

Celie emerges

The Broadway Theatre, a plush hall with soft red fabric on the walls, is one of the largest on the Great White Way with 1,720 seats. At this evening's performance, almost every red velvety seat is occupied.

Fantasia enters wearing a dingy, light-colored dress. In the first glimpse, we can see that Fantasia has matured. It's all in her face, or Celie's face, the face of a person forsaken by her own blood.

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