Posted: 10/20/25 at 4:54pm
Wife and I saw it Saturday evening and YIKES! Easily one of the worst shows I've ever seen. Ran 3 hours and most of that was just characters doing funny voices talking and talking and talking. The music was pretty much an afterthought and the songs that were chosen didn't even really do what they were intended to do. Now I am not a fan of Prince or his music and have never seen the original film, but surely they could do better than this.
Prince and Apollonia share maybe 10 minutes of stage time and a weekend together within the story and yet we're expected to believe their relationship is this mega-important thing. They literally don't interact in the entire second act and Apollonia's resolution is done completely off-stage.
The performer playing prince is a good musician but a terrible actor and the Prince character himself is absent from most of the second act except for a few scenes where he lays on stage while recorded videos of people screaming at him are displayed above. Then a few more characters come on stage and yell at him in person, then more video is played of people screaming at him, then he contemplates suicide because he's an a-hole and people yelled at him. Then he gets one last pep talk, cheers way up and sings Purple Rain, curtain. I kid you not that's his arc.
The music is not well chosen and will massively disappoint people going in thinking its going to be a greatest hits jukebox musical ala Beautiful Noise or MJ. The songs are just boring. Literally twice a song is sung on stage and then characters in the show comment how bad the song just was. Like WTF?
The "comedy" is very one-note and basically the humor comes from the "villain" being a misogynistic pig making comments about bitches, hoes, and being on your period. I'm not kidding.
There are some monologues that are so long and so pointless you feel you were watching a high school one act play.
This show has zero idea what its trying to be. Is it totally fictional, based on true events, biographical, WHAT? The script is honestly laughable. The dialogue is amateurish. They refer to real places like Lake Minnetonka, but then instead of using names like First Avenue and Minneapolis they use THE FIRST and MINNEAPPLE.
This show is DOA and needs to be completely redone, from scratch. The audience was completely decked out in purple but you could sense extreme unease and disappointment. Just make a Prince greatest hits show, nobody wants this angry mess.
