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Until they asked her to help write the music for The Color Purple, Brenda Russell knew two things about the classic Alice Walker novel. The first was that she absolutely loved the book. And the second was that, in 1984, she had auditioned as an actress for the part of Shug in the Steven Spielberg film adaptation.

The audition didn't go so well – “It was a total disaster,” she says with a laugh now – but her interest remained and almost two decades later, she got a call from her friend Allee Willis, writer of (among other things) I'll Be There for You, the theme from Friends, one of the most popular TV sitcom songs ever. Willis had been commissioned by Scott Sanders, who had never produced a Broadway show but was determined to produce a stage musical of Purple, so Willis was looking for collaborators.

She found them. Russell, Willis and Stephen Bray (a long-time member of Madonna's entourage) eventually created the music and lyrics, while Marsha Norman ('night, Mother) was brought in to write the book.

Five years and 11 Tony Award nominations later, the road show version of the musical opens at Toronto's Canon Theatre, part of the Mirvish organization's subscription season. The $11-million show has been a major success, grossing more than $103-million (U.S.) during its three-year run on Broadway.

Russell hopes to be in attendance for the Toronto opening – in many ways, she said in a recent interview, it would be like coming home. She spent a large part of her youth in Hamilton, where her late father, Gus Gordon, a former member of The Ink Spots, moved to escape the rampant racism he experienced in America. And it was on the stage of another Mirvish-owned theatre, the Royal Alexandra, that Russell was part of the original Canadian cast of Hair in 1970. The late Clive Barnes called it the best of four Hairs he had seen, “the hairiest Hair yet.”

The Toronto cast of Purple is headlined by Kenita Miller as Celie (she understudied and then played the role on Broadway), American Idol finalist LaToya London as her sister Nettie, and Felicia Fields as Sofia, a role that won her a Tony nomination on Broadway.

Russell, whose composing hits include Piano in the Dark (sung by Oleta Adams) and If Only for One Night (the late Luther Vandross), recalls a profound sense of culture shock when she moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Hamilton as a child. “I was the only black kid in the entire school, the only black kid anyone had ever met.” Was there racism? “Well, they picked on me for being black, but it wasn't racism like we had in the States. They just had preconceived ideas of what blacks were. They assumed I could sing and dance, and, as it happened, I could. But my father loved it here. He had never felt so treated like a human being.”

By the time she went to New York to audition for Hair in her late teens, Russell (then Brenda Gordon) was already stage-savvy, having performed at Toronto's famed Blue Note club. But it was on an old piano in the lobby of the Royal Alex, she recalls, that she learned to play – an indispensable asset to her later songwriting career. “I loved Toronto,” she says. “I made a lot of lifetime friends there.”

Later, with her musician husband, Brian Russell, she released two albums on Elton John's Rocket label, and appeared on two tracks from Robert Palmer's Double Fun. Divorced and living in Los Angeles for the past 30 years, Russell works as a solo performer as well as writing for others.

She says she had “an epiphany” early on and realized that when she was writing music, “it wasn't just me. I was getting help from a higher place. I was always a spiritual person, but it hit me that it's not all on my shoulders, that a force bigger than me was at work, and that what I had to do was open up and have the desire and the intent, and the music would come to me. And it has.”

That faith, she adds, enabled her to deal with the pressure of writing a Broadway musical. A few of the songs, inevitably, did not make the final cut. That was “totally humbling. There were tears, definitely. They were like children.”

But she never lost faith that the production would get launched: “Scott Sanders had such a strong energy, and he had financing … and we had great music. That train was already rolling down the tracks.”

Unlike the Spielberg movie, the musical does not shy away from the lesbian love relationship at the centre of the book.

“That's the only way to work,” says Norman, the playwright. “We wanted to be more faithful to be the book. We wanted to be really clear that it was a sexual relationship. That was very important to the cast. I was terrified how churchgoing audiences would react, when they come to the end of act one and two women are kissing. But they are in fact overjoyed, because there is real love and real generosity.”

The Color Purple runs at Toronto's Canon Theatre until March 14 (416-872-1212).