A frenzied performance of “Let’s Go Crazy”? Check. A set that resembles the Minneapolis club First Avenue? Check. But a scene in which a woman is tossed into a trash bin against her will? Or saucy pickup lines? Hold the check.
Early this year, plans for a stage musical based on Prince’s landmark Purple Rain movie and album were announced, with a premiere set for Minneapolis’s State Theatre next spring before a possible move to Broadway. In fact, the team behind the production has been toiling away on the show for several years. With the 40th anniversary of the album and movie arriving this summer, the creatives trying to bring it to the stage are finally talking about the multiple challenges of transforming Prince’s historic moment into a musical, from casting the lead role to grappling with scenes in the film that could now be considered at best outdated, or worse inappropriate.
“We have to live up to the largeness of what he put down and make it feel just as alive and vibrant as it did then,” director Lileana Blain-Cruz tells Rolling Stone. “It’s an exciting challenge. But is it a little terrifying? It is for me. You feel responsibility to make it feel just as thrilling as it did when it first came out.”
According to Revolution drummer Bobby Z., a.k.a. Bobby Rivkin, the combination of musical theater and Prince, who died in 2016, made sense when he began hearing about the Purple Rain proposal years ago. Bobby Z. recalls his late boss and friend growing animated after he’d seen Rent and, later, Hamilton, both of which Prince loved. “It was one of those days in the studio and he said, ‘Wow, we should really take this to the stage, like Broadway,’” Z. recalls of whatever project he and Prince were working on at the time. “He didn’t think he could personally do it, because it’s a different animal. But he lit up on that. Which gives me a feeling that [Purple Rain] going forward is in the spirit of something creatively in his orbit.”
Plans for the current production started shortly before the pandemic, when producer Orin Wolf (whose credits include pop-based productions like the Carole King musical Beautiful and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise) started conversations with Prince’s ever-evolving estate. After locking down the rights to the movie and the music, Wolf hired playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate), followed by Blain-Cruz and musical supervisor Jason Michael Webb (who worked on the Michael Jackson musical MJ). Eventually, Bobby Z. and later Prince keyboardist Morris Hayes were hired to beef up the musical and maintain instrumental authenticity of the songs.
According to Wolf, Purple Rain will adhere closely to the framework of the movie in telling the story of the Kid, the Minneapolis musician bedeviled by an abusive father, a suave but cutthroat rival, intra-band friction, and his own emotional development. “We’re taking the framework of the film and going to try to honor it in every way,” says Wolf. “This is about First Avenue. It’s about the Kid dealing with all sorts of demons, and the music he plays and the problems he has with the Revolution. All those characters are going to be in this and they’re all very much inspired by and based on what already existed.”
In a sign of how much time has passed since Purple Rain opened in theaters and elevated Prince to an entirely new pop-culture echelon, Jacobs-Jenkins — who was born the same year of the movie and album — hadn’t seen the film until the idea for a show was bandied around. He was especially struck by Prince commanding the stage during the controversial “Darling Nikki”: “There was something about his performance in that number specifically, where I was like, ‘Oh, this man was actually a genius of the stage.’ I wanted to see it live. I wanted to see it in a theater, which is usually a good sign for me.”
Jacobs-Jenkins immersed himself in the movie script and what he calls “nine handwritten, single-space notebook pages” that Prince left behind, in which the late pop star wrote about the project and its origins. The playwright also saw the Purple Rain movie as very much in the stage musical tradition. “He wrote the Apollonia 6 songs and he and Dez Dickerson’s song,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is like musical theater.’ You have to be able to inhabit multiple voices, and you’re creating a whole world full of characters and conflict. I think he actually was making a musical, whether or not he would say he was doing that.”
The Purple Rain musical, though, will be elongated in certain ways, including newly written scenes that will lend more back story to some of its key figures. “We’re looking closely at the female characters,” says Wolf. “Prince was a champion of all the females in his life. So we want to give Apollonia a lot more agency in her choices. Wendy and Lisa are great, strong female characters. Branden is allowing those characters to have a little bit more breadth.” Jacobs-Jenkins is also intrigued by exploring tension within the cinematic version of the Revolution: “It may have been some of the editing choices, but I want to see what we can do to repair Prince’s vision, and that means expanding on certain folks.”
Since the Purple Rain album is only nine songs in length, the musical team has also been given permission to dig into Prince’s catalog to add other material to the show, likely from the same era. The song list hasn’t been nailed down, but fans may hear some Prince deep cuts or additional songs by the Time or Apollonia 6. “We’re getting a chance to dive into some of that music he created in order to tell stories in new and unexpected ways, leaving easter eggs for fans who really know the deep cuts and the unreleased material,” says Webb.
Blain-Cruz’s vision for stage sets includes one modeled after First Avenue and the Kid’s bedroom, and she’s pushing hard to have the Kid’s motorcycle — a major part of the film — be on stage too, whether it’s feasible or not. “Yes!” she says. “I have said it out loud in Rolling Stone! We’ll see if I get it. But I want a motorcycle.”
Whether some of the precise dialogue from the movie will make the transition to the stage remains to be scene. Jacobs-Jenkins jokes that one of Morris Day’s come-on lines to Apollonia — “I have a brass … waterbed!” — may not survive. “Every other line of that movie is like so quotable,” he says. “But I think you have to ask yourself, does anyone really remember waterbeds? We’ve all watched the movie together a couple of times, and we will still stop and look at scenes and go, ‘Okay, does this work now?’ That’s part of the fun of the process.”
On a more somber note, the Purple Rain team is also wrestling with parts of the Kid’s character that are far less flattering. The Kid dismisses the Wendy and Lisa characters’ own music as “stupid” and initially refuses to play any of it, and he slaps the Apollonia character after she tells him that she may be working with his rival Morris (Day). In another scene, the Jerome character picks up a woman and tosses her into a Dumpster.
“One of the challenges of adapting anything is you have to constantly ask yourself, ‘What’s the one thing that, if I took it away, it would stop being Purple Rain?” Jacobs-Jenkins asks.
How many of those jarring scenes will make the cut? “All those questions are on the table,” says Jacobs-Jenkins. “One of the most annoying notes you get as a writer is ‘Your character is not likable.’ I keep saying, ‘Go back and watch the movie!’ This is a story of a really young person who is messed up and trying to figure out how to un-mess himself up. And that means we watch someone really struggle and do things that maybe are unsavory to us. The story is filled with a lot of complication in that way.”
Adds Wolf, “There’s a dark side of this character. Prince was asking some big questions about young artists who are going through a time in their life and with all these complications. I’m not trying to sugar-coat it too much, either. There are elements of the Kid that are really hard.”
Who exactly will play the Kid also hasn’t been decided; according to Blain-Cruz, the show’s casting director has seen “thousands and thousands” of candidates. Wolf says they’re leaning away from hiring a known “megastar” in order for the audience to focus on the character of the Kid and not Prince himself.
All of which promises a stressful coming year until the musical opens, complete with devoted Prince fans who will be tracking each and every bit of news about the show. (Some may well lob questions at the musical team this weekend, when they appear at the Celebration 2024, a series of shows and panels at Paisley Park tied to Purple Rain‘s 40th.) “Check in with us in three months,” Jacobs-Jenkins says with a nervous laugh. “We’re not going to have any hair left.”