Elisabeth Vincentelli

Elisabeth Vincentelli

Tony winner Sutton Foster shines in ‘Violet’

Give it up for Sutton Foster: She’s using her superpowers for good, not evil.

If the two-time Tony winner hadn’t taken the title role in Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s “Violet,” the show — which had a short off-Broadway run in 1997 before sinking into obscurity — probably wouldn’t have made it to Broadway, where the Roundabout Theatre Company opened it Sunday night.

But if Foster’s good for the production’s profile, “Violet” returns the favor by giving the star her richest, most rewarding role to date.

Set in 1964, the musical follows our feisty, 25-year-old heroine on a bus trip from tiny Spruce Pine, NC, to Tulsa, Okla., home to the televangelist she thinks can make her beautiful: As a 13-year-old girl (Emerson Steele), she was slashed by an ax that left a “scar that cuts a rainbow clear across my cheek.”

There’s no makeup to show us that wound — we guess the extent of the damage from the horrified reactions of the people she meets — but Foster hauntingly suggests Violet’s pain. Her resilience and strength, too: This is no passive victim.

On the bus she befriends Army men Monty (Colin Donnell, “Anything Goes”) and Flick (a sensational Joshua Henry, late of “The Scottsboro Boys”). Flick knows what it’s like to be rejected for the way you look — after all, he’s a black man in the South.

Leigh Silverman’s lovely staging, which debuted at Encores! last summer, enlists and rewards our imagination: A few chairs evoke a bus, a single bed suggests a boarding house. The glorious cast — including a scene-stealing Annie Golden as both a hooker and a religious matron — does the rest.

The real journey here is of a woman learning to accept herself. It could easily be maudlin and hokey, but instead “Violet” bursts with life and energy, humor and tenderness.

As for the score, it’s simply one of the best of the past 20 years. Played by an onstage band that includes fiddle, cello and guitars, it mixes gospel, country, bluegrass, R&B and traditional musical-theater balladry without sounding like derivative pastiche. Hearing Foster tear through the twangy, raucous “All to Pieces” makes you hope she cuts a tribute to Loretta Lynn one day, while Henry brings down the house with the powerful anthem “Let It Sing.”

The trip took a while, but “Violet” is home at last.