Let’s go crazy. Forty-two years after Prince stepped onto a Minneapolis stage and changed the world, his story is coming to Broadway. Purple Rain: The Musical will open at the Majestic Theatre on April 12, 2027, bringing over 20 of Prince’s most iconic songs — “When Doves Cry,” “I Would Die 4 U,” “The Beautiful Ones,” “Let’s Go Crazy” and the title song itself — to the stage where The Phantom of the Opera once made Broadway history. This is one of the most hotly anticipated musicals in years, backed by a Tony-winning creative team, new producers including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s company, and the full blessing and involvement of Prince’s closest musical collaborators. Here is everything you need to know.

What Is the Purple Rain Musical?

Purple Rain is a stage musical based on the 1984 film of the same name, with music and lyrics by Prince and a book by Peter Duchan. The musical is adapted from the original screenplay by Albert Magnoli and William Blinn.

The 1984 film starring Prince himself was a cultural phenomenon — Prince wrote the songs for the film, and won an Academy Award for Best Original Score. The film also produced one of the best-selling albums in history, with the Purple Rain soundtrack spending 24 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and going on to sell over 25 million copies worldwide. Now, for the first time, that story — of a young, gifted, and complicated musician known only as The Kid, fighting to find his sound in Minneapolis while navigating family trauma, romantic desire, and artistic rivalry — is coming to the Broadway stage.

The synopsis: Minneapolis, 1984. A new era of music television is creating overnight stars. A magnetic young performer known as “The Kid” seems like the perfect frontman to lead his bandmates to stardom. But when his past threatens everything he’s built, he’ll have to sing his way out of the darkness and into the spotlight where he belongs.

The Songs: More Than 20 Prince Classics

The musical will hit the Great White Way at the Majestic Theatre and feature more than 20 of Prince’s iconic hits. While the full setlist has not yet been officially confirmed for the Broadway production, confirmed titles include songs from both the Purple Rain album and the broader Prince catalogue. Here are the songs confirmed to be in the production:

The musical’s music team is led by Jason Michael Webb, who won a Tony Award for his work on MJ the Musical — making him perhaps the most qualified person alive to handle the live-theatre orchestration of an iconic pop icon’s body of work. Longtime Prince collaborators and bandmates Bobby Z and Morris Hayes serve as Prince music advisors. Having the musicians who actually played on the original recordings in the room gives the Broadway production an authenticity that is almost unique in the jukebox musical genre.

The Broadway Creative Team

One of the most striking things about the Broadway production of Purple Rain is the calibre and diversity of its creative team. After the creative shake-up that followed the mixed reception in Minneapolis (more on that below), producers have assembled a genuinely formidable line-up of talent for the Broadway bow.

The production’s design also includes video and projection design by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, hair and wig design by Cookie Jordan, and makeup design by Kyle Krueger. The Shubert Organization’s Majestic Theatre — a 1,800-seat house that is the second-largest on Broadway — gives the production the scale to truly honour Prince’s epic concert-hall ambitions.

The Producers: Orin Wolf, Lin-Manuel Miranda and More

Viajes Miranda, the production team comprising Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr., have been added to the producing team for the upcoming Broadway production of Purple Rain. The addition of the Miranda family — whose producing credits include Hamilton and whose cultural influence in Broadway is unparalleled — signals the very highest level of commercial ambition and institutional support for the show.

Lead producer Orin Wolf — whose credits include the acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club, one of recent Broadway’s most warmly received jukebox-adjacent productions — is the driving force behind the project. Wolf has spoken repeatedly about his personal passion for Prince’s music and his belief that the story of Purple Rain is tailor-made for the emotional intimacy and theatrical power of a Broadway stage.

Bobby Z and Morris Hayes, both of whom worked with Prince for years as bandmates and musical collaborators, are music advisers on the production. Their involvement is more than symbolic. Bobby Z — the drummer who played on virtually every Prince album from 1978 onwards — and Morris Hayes, the keyboardist who joined Prince’s band in 1991 and remained until his death, are actively shaping the way the music is presented on stage. They are, in every meaningful sense, the custodians of Prince’s sound.

The World Premiere in Minneapolis: What Really Happened

Before Broadway, Purple Rain had its world premiere in Prince’s hometown — exactly where it should have begun. The musical premiered at the State Theatre in Minneapolis as a pre-Broadway engagement. The production began previews on October 16, 2025, officially opened on November 5, 2025, and closed on November 23, 2025.

The decision to premiere in Minneapolis was deeply meaningful and strategically smart. The Minneapolis production attracted those looking for “the magic and community and just that glimmer of fun and hope and joy that Prince brought to Minnesota” — The New York Times. The city that gave the world Prince, First Avenue, and the sound of Minneapolis responded with an outpouring of civic pride that few theatrical premieres anywhere have matched. Downtown Minneapolis was literally bathed in purple light on opening night.

The Reviews: Triumphant But Honest

The critical reception in Minneapolis was complex — enthusiastic about the production’s emotional power and the quality of the performances, but equally honest about the areas that needed work before Broadway. That honesty has, in the long run, served the production well. Here is what the critics said:

The consensus from Minneapolis was clear: the music was extraordinary, the emotional bones of the story were strong, the female characters — particularly Apollonia — were given more agency and depth than in the original film, and Kris Kollins had the musical talent and Prince-like physicality to carry the role. But the book needed work and the lead actor’s dramatic skills needed more development. The producers heard the message.

The Minneapolis Cast: Who Was in the World Premiere

The Minneapolis production assembled a remarkable ensemble. The Minneapolis production featured the following principal cast, including Kris Kollins making his professional stage debut as The Kid, alongside Rachel Webb as Apollonia.

The Creative Shake-Up: What Changed After Minneapolis

The Minneapolis run ended on November 23, 2025, and the production went quiet for several months. When it re-emerged in the summer of 2026 with the Broadway announcement, it came with a significant creative shake-up that signalled the producers were taking the constructive criticism from Minnesota seriously.

The stage adaptation of the Prince movie-musical Purple Rain will come to Broadway in 2027. Also newly revealed is a fairly major creative team shake-up at the musical. Saheem Ali (Buena Vista Social Club) will take the reins as director, succeeding Lileana Blain-Cruz; and Peter Duchan (Dogfight) has replaced Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as book writer.

The replacement of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner widely regarded as one of the most important playwrights of his generation — with Peter Duchan was the most eyebrow-raising development. Sources familiar with the production indicated that the creative vision that Jacobs-Jenkins brought to the material was not always aligned with the commercial and accessibility requirements of a major Broadway jukebox musical. Duchan, whose work on Dogfight demonstrated a gift for emotionally grounded book-writing, is expected to deliver something more dramatically direct and theatrically satisfying.

Director Saheem Ali, who had previously collaborated with Orin Wolf on the acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club, brings a track record of handling music-driven material with both theatrical precision and cultural sensitivity. “I am honored to join the ‘Purple Rain’ family and help carry this story forward. Our aim is not only to honor the legacy that Prince built, but to make his timeless music feel urgent and alive, passing it on to the next generation of fans who will make it their own,” Ali said.

Prince: The Legacy the Musical Must Honour

Any discussion of the Broadway production must begin with an acknowledgement of what it is attempting to honour. Prince Rogers Nelson — born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, died at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016 — was not merely a pop star. He was one of the most musically gifted, visually extraordinary, and commercially successful artists in the history of recorded music: a musician who played all 27 instruments on his debut album, who could move between funk, rock, R&B, pop, and jazz in a single song, and whose visual and sexual iconography redefined what a performer could be.

The Purple Rain album was released on June 25, 1984, the same day as the film, and spent 24 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. It won two Grammy Awards and one Academy Award. The film itself — a semi-autobiographical drama that Prince starred in largely as himself, under the fictional alias The Kid — grossed over $68 million against a $7.2 million budget. It is one of the most commercially successful music-related films ever made.

What makes Purple Rain so powerful as source material for a stage musical is precisely its theatrical nature. Prince’s performances in the film — particularly the climactic title-song sequence — are already conceived as theatrical events. The live concert footage in the film, the narrative of an artist finding his voice and his place, the clash between art and commerce, between vulnerability and showmanship — all of it translates naturally to a stage that can contain and amplify those emotions.

The Majestic Theatre: A Home Worthy of the Music

The choice of the Majestic Theatre is significant. The Majestic — located at 245 West 44th Street — is one of Broadway’s grandest and most historically loaded venues. It was home to The Phantom of the Opera for its entire 35-year Broadway run, the longest in Broadway history. The theatre seats approximately 1,800 people across three levels, and its size and acoustics make it one of the few Broadway houses genuinely equipped to create the concert-level sound that Prince’s music requires.

The Majestic is operated by the Shubert Organization, which has thrown its full institutional weight behind the production. With Tony-winning sound designer Gareth Owen at the helm of the audio, the production is determined to ensure that the music — always Prince’s most powerful weapon — hits audiences with the force of a live concert rather than a tamed-down theatrical approximation.

How Does the Musical Differ From the 1984 Film?

The stage adaptation is emphatically not a scene-for-scene recreation of the film. In fact, some of the most interesting creative decisions involve deliberate departures from the source material — departures designed to make the story more dramatically satisfying and more culturally sensitive for 2027 audiences.

The plot is changed up, female characters are given more agency and even the traumas that haunt the Kid get a kind of psycho-dramatic gloss. The musical moves to correct misogyny present in the film, giving the women more agency and richer stories. The characters of Wendy and Lisa — The Revolution members who were somewhat peripheral in the film — are given expanded storylines in the musical, including a subplot about their frustration with The Kid’s controlling behavior and their decision to leave the band and join Apollonia 6. This decision to centre and develop the female characters gives the musical a narrative dimension the film lacked.

The character of Apollonia is also significantly expanded. In the film, Apollonia is primarily defined by her relationship with The Kid and her rivalry with Morris Day’s girlfriend. In the musical, Rachel Webb’s Apollonia goes from “fresh off the bus” girl to club stardom, demonstrating incredible mastery of singing, dancing, and dramatic acting — a full arc that gives the production a second protagonist worthy of the role.

The production is also not afraid to sit with the darkness of the story — the domestic violence, the family trauma, the self-destructiveness — rather than smoothing it away. This willingness to honour the complexity of the material, rather than reducing it to a feel-good celebration, is what separates it from lesser jukebox musicals and gives it the dramatic weight to justify its ambitions.

Why This Musical Matters Now

The timing of the Broadway production — opening in spring 2027, more than ten years after Prince’s death — feels exactly right. In the years since his passing, Prince’s catalogue has reached an entirely new generation of listeners who discovered his music through streaming, through Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour (which sampled and celebrated his influence extensively), and through the broader cultural reassessment of 1980s Black artistry and expression that is reshaping how we understand popular music history.

Three weeks before the Broadway announcement, the Purple Rain album had re-entered the Billboard 200. That is not a coincidence — it is evidence of a genuine and growing cultural appetite for Prince’s music that the Broadway production is positioned to channel and amplify. For fans who have grown up with the music but who never got to see Prince live, the Majestic Theatre is offering something extraordinary: the closest thing possible to experiencing his artistry in real time.

Broadway has long excelled at transforming the legacies of musical icons into theatrical events — from MJ the Musical to Tina to Ain’t Too Proud — but few of those icons have a story as inherently theatrical, as musically rich, or as emotionally complex as Prince. The city of Minneapolis gave the world Prince. Now Broadway is giving him back — and on April 12, 2027, the purple rain will finally fall on West 44th Street.

How to Get Tickets for Purple Rain Broadway

Tickets will go on sale in September 2026 at Telecharge. The Majestic Theatre is located at 245 W 44th Street, New York City. Demand is expected to be extremely high from the moment tickets go on sale. Fans are advised to sign up for updates and pre-sale notifications at PurpleRainBroadway.com immediately.