‘It Feels Like a Rocket Ship’: Behind the New Broadway Musical of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’
Categoria: Musica
The producer and musical director of the show, coming in spring 2027, are hopeful that it's a show Prince himself would have approved of.
Por Billboard | 27/07/2026
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called….a Purple Rain musical? You read that correctly: the iconic 1984 movie (with its accompanying, now canon soundtrack album) has been adapted for the stage. After an initial 2025 out-of-town production in Prince ’s own Minneapolis, it will officially come to Broadway in spring of 2027, starting previews March 12 and opening April 12 at the Majestic Theatre. “Everything that Prince did in his career was so theatrical,” producer Orin Wolf tells Billboard . “So it’s just an organic move from the film to the stage.” Wolf has plenty of experience bringing innovative musicals with pop music origins to Broadway: he produced best musical Tony-winners Once and The Band’s Visit , as well as recent nominees like Illinoise and Buena Vista Social Club . And he’s assembled a stacked creative team that includes director Saheem Ali (with whom he worked on Buena Vista ) and Tony-winning music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Jason Michael Webb, who most recently served as music director of the mega-successful Michael Jackson musical MJ . “There are a lot of different ways in which musicians’ catalogs get put into story form, but it’s very rare to have a story where the impulse came from the musician himself or herself,” Wolf says. “But Purple Rain really was something that came from Prince’s own imagination — not just the song and the album, but the story of The Kid, the idea of telling a story about what it was like to grow up in the mid ’80s in Minneapolis and to come up in that scene. A lot of things were inspired by his own experience as an artist and his life, but truly, this was an invention of his, and that was fascinating to me.” Shortly before announcing the Broadway production, Wolf and Webb spoke to Billboard about the work they’ve done on Purple Rain , what Prince knew of the show and what audiences can expect from it. What the thinking was behind Purple Rain needing a stage adaptation in the first place? Orin Wolf: My impulse around it started with what I thought was just this very rare opportunity with a catalog show like this. There are so few properties like that that exist, especially at this magnitude, with this kind of reach and this kind of global following. And then beyond that, as I learned more about the story of how the film was made and how the album and the songs came together, he was actually responding to the story — I mean, there were examples of songs like “When Doves Cry” that were written while they were shooting, in response to a moment in the film they needed to complete. That was very instructive in terms of what I think my assignment was as a producer, which is to really try to get underneath what [Prince’s] initial impulses were. You can love or hate the film, but the point is that it came from an artist. Was the idea of the musical something Prince was aware of in his lifetime? Wolf: By the time I got involved official