One Fan Show

Does the idea of “Prince goes Broadway” make you wince? If so, the producers behind the Purple Rain musical — currently playing at the State Theatre in Minneapolis ahead of a planned New York debut — have offered plenty of assurances about their decorated creative team, who have collectively racked up multiple Tony Awards and a Pulitzer.

As the musical officially opened Wednesday night after weeks of previews, those promises vanished in a puff of purple smoke. The cast kicked off the night with the party-starting “Let’s Go Crazy,” which features the lyrics: “You see I called my old lady / For a friendly word / She picked up the phone / Dropped it on the floor / [Ah, ah] is all I heard.” As they’re being sung, a dancer hunched over in a grandma costume flings off her rags and starts twerking in a skimpy neon getup. Another lyric: “You better live now / Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door.” Guess who shows up next? A cloaked specter with a scythe, followed by an actor carrying a purple banana, another literal lyric reference. 

I guess Broadway didn’t send its best to Minneapolis. Or should I say the “Mini Apple”? For some inexplicable reason, book writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2025 Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner for his play Purpose, has the characters repeatedly reference the city with this term that no one who lives in Minneapolis actually uses. For out-of-towners, the anachronistic use of soon-to-be-dated slang like “slaps,” “bangers,” and “she ate” in a show that otherwise sounds and looks like the ‘80s and ‘90s may be similarly grating.

I wish I could say it gets better from there, but besides two transcendent moments when Kris Kollins gloriously matches Prince’s magnetism in the role of the Kid (more on that later), the magic that made Purple Rain a lasting phenomenon is absent from this production. It’s the parade of inexplicable creative choices that form the connective tissue of this muddled stage adaptation.

The story starts out similar enough to the 1984 movie: a young frontman, known only as the Kid, and his band the Revolution are stuck in a funk at a Minneapolis club called the First. (That’s right, they don’t say “First Avenue.” Couldn’t a $26.5 million musical get the rights to use it?) Not only are they opening for the Kid’s nemesis, Morris Day and his band the Time, but the self-professed musical genius at the helm is in a creative rut, and he’s not willing to play anything written by his bandmates — even though Lisa (Emma Lenderman) and Wendy (Grace Yoo) have some tunes the other members dig. 

Enter Apollonia (Rachel Webb, who could be making a star turn here if the material didn’t let her down), a wannabe singer and songwriter who’s making a pit stop in Minneapolis on her way to New York. When the Kid pushes his band to the point of breaking up after an onstage outburst, it’s Apollonia who arrives backstage and offers him the inspiration he’s been craving. They immediately start writing songs together, with her offering up the start of one she’s been working on (“Take Me With U”), and the Kid helping make it shine.

You can see how this premise would sound promising as a way to update Purple Rain for 2025. Apollonia is now on the Kid’s level: a real musician, not just a muse. He in turn is not simply jealous of those who may steal her away from him — as Morris (Jared Howelton, in a comic tour de force) will attempt — but of the limelight she may take for herself, too. Combined with a fleshed out fight between the frontman and his female bandmates, which is also central to the movie, the Purple Rain musical sets out partly to tell a story of female empowerment.

Unfortunately, director Lileana Blain-Cruz and writer Jacobs-Jenkins pulled out a box of clichés to tell that story. Wendy’s feminist quips, like asking club owner Billy (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) if he can even name one female-fronted band, land like tweets from a decade ago. Apollonia’s family life is diminished to bruises the Kid sees on her arms he suspects are from her father; later, a member of a girl group she’s hooked up with looks into her eyes and tells her she’s a “runner” who’s been running away from things all her life.

Is this a Broadway-bound musical or an after-school special? (For theater fans, Purple Rain appears to have learned all the wrong lessons from the cringeworthy Jagged Little Pill.)

The Kid’s tortured past is explored more thoroughly, though it’s handled with similar ham-handedness. When his verbal sparring match with Apollonia over their creative partnership turns violent, we see the life circumstances that influenced his reaction: his father physically abusing him and his mother. Except instead of this playing out on stage, it’s played in video projections on the back wall, as though in the Kid’s mind, with crackling audio and moans from Kollins cluing us into the agonizing flashbacks. It’s a visually arresting touch that feels like a horror movie. It also feels like a cop-out — to relegate the main character’s formative pain to a video. If I wanted to watch a movie, I’d watch Purple Rain. 

That’s not to say the projections by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom aren’t impressive. Across the board, the technical aspects of this musical are stunning, especially for a pre-Broadway tryout, including the arena-worthy light show from Yi Zhao and accompanying scenic design by David Zinn which includes a concert stage that — speaking as someone who’s been to countless shows and dance nights at First Ave — realistically recalls the iconic venue. The creative team even incorporated the hottest current theater trend: camera operators who run around during a concert scene projecting a live feed of close-up video onto a screen above the stage. 

But when the story is as clumsy as this reworked Purple Rain, these stage tricks just make you yearn for back-to-basics theater. Which is why a short scene during “Empty Room,” a lesser-known Prince song that was never even released as a studio recording, in which the Kid plays guitar against a black backdrop while Apollonia dances made me sit forward in my seat. (Apart from the nine songs that make up the Purple Rain album, the show incorporates more than a dozen others by Prince.) As did a simple father-son moment between the Kid and his washed-up old man (Leon Addison Brown, who mines the role for all its worth).

As for those transcendent moments from Kollins, who is making his professional acting debut here in a mixed performance, neither come during the climactic title song. Instead, when the Kid is professing his love to Apollonia in “The Beautiful Ones,” Kollins writhes on the ground and wails in a sublime echo of Prince. Later, in “Darling Nikki,” when he’s tearing down Apollonia in vicious fashion, you may not believe the Kid as a character can be redeemed, but Kollins proves he has what it takes to channel an artist that many thought to be unreplicable.

Is the Kid redeemed in the end? Your answer may depend on how big of an emotional attachment you have to the final song, “Purple Rain.” But as for the musical itself, in its current form, it becomes irredeemable before Kollins and company have a chance to encourage the audience to put their hands in the air for that finale. [Note: Major spoilers ahead.]

After the Kid publicly humiliates Apollonia, he receives increasingly hostile voicemails from seemingly everyone in his life, which are depicted in video projections over Kollins lying on the ground. Once it appears he has broken every bond tethering him to friendship, happiness, and love, he slips a cord around his neck as if to hang himself…when someone knocks at the door.

It’s two of his bandmates. His dad called them because he was worried. Now that they’re here, will the Kid finally apologize? Will he face down his family trauma and the pain he’s caused others? Nope. Instead, his friends say they did some digging and found out that he’s had a rough life, so they can forgive him. After all, everyone in the band has something they’re struggling with: dating troubles, single troubles, working multiple jobs to pay off student debt. And do you ever watch the news? It’s tough out there. (This is real dialogue, if not exact quotes.)

And then one of his friends, Lisa, says something to the effect of: “Maybe what’s wrong with all of us is that our brains aren’t fully developed yet. After all, we’re barely adults.” 

This is what it sounds like when the creative well runs dry.

Full Transparency: I received a free ticket to Purple Rain. 

Purple Rain

State Theatre
805 Hennepin Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55402

October 16th – November 23rd
Read more and buy tickets here