Broadway tends to chew up and spit out rich bankers with dreams of dabbling in the theater. But Stephen C. Byrd is determined not to be among them.

A former investment banker for Goldman Sachs who is now a partner of a private equity fund, Byrd has invested $3.8 million trying to mount a black revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Along the way, he's snagged (and then lost, due to scheduling conflicts) an armada of stars, from Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker to Angela Bassett and Halle Berry. At one point he even approached LL Cool J to play Brick, a part immortalized by Paul Newman in the 1958 film. Casting issues got so bad last year that Byrd and his producing partner, Clarence Chandron, were ridiculed in theater-trade rags as incompetent moneybags. No matter, says Byrd. "Through all the setbacks and the naysayers, I kept it in my heart."

This month the show will at last go on—and it lands Byrd, 54, in the midst of a boomlet for black theater. The Color Purple, based on the Alice Walker novel, recouped its $11 million investment in less than a year and finished a three-year run in February. The 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun was another hit, making back its $2.4 million investment in two months. Later this spring, Laurence Fishburne will star in a one-man show about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. (See how Broadway shows with black themes have fared.)

For Byrd, it's the end of a long journey. After retiring early from Goldman, he formed a film production company in the early '90s. His first projects, biopics set in the Old West, fizzled; he then set his sights on Broadway revivals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, plays that Byrd had loved since he was a teenager. In 1994, he contacted Maria St. Just, the elderly executor of Williams' estate. Three days before St. Just's death, Byrd signed a deal to mount black productions of both dramas. St. Just's only condition: that James Earl Jones play Big Daddy, Cat's father figure.

Jones agreed to the role, and Byrd recruited Bassett, Fishburne, and Lloyd Richards, the director of the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun. Then Richards became busy with other projects, and Jones "went off to do Verizon commercials," says Byrd. "There went my shot at Broadway and a great deal of money." He joined a hedge fund to help pay the bills, but the idea of a black Cat continued to obsess him. Last fall he took up the project, and its challenges, again. One high-profile hire—Kenny Leon, who had also directed the successful Raisin in the Sun revival—ended badly, with Leon's withdrawal after a fight over casting. A few more stars also committed, then backed out. Eventually, Byrd landed Terrence Howard, of Hustle and Flow, as Brick, and as Maggie, Anika Noni Rose, who made a splash in the film of Dreamgirls.

While Byrd doesn't anticipate a killing with Cat, he does expect it to earn back its $2.8 million production budget and the $1 million he spent keeping the project alive. His next fantasy: a Will Smith-Jada Pinkett Smith Streetcar.