7 ways the ‘Purple Rain’ musical changed from previews

Even his royal slyness himself, Prince, sometimes had to take a little time to get things right.

For the new stage adaptation of his movie and album “Purple Rain,” the musical’s cast and crew had three weeks prior to opening night to work out the kinks, including how to properly pull off the kinky stuff. They apparently took full advantage of that gestation period.

Thanks to Prince and his iconic 1984 work being so heavily based in Minneapolis, Twin Cities audiences were given the rare chance to see preview performances of the Broadway-aimed production. The show was first performed for audiences on Oct. 16 at the State Theatre. Previews continued right up until Tuesday ahead of Wednesday’s official premiere, which the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Broadway and Prince experts called “funkily electric” but also still in need of some tweaks.

Those of us who were there for that first preview did not see any dramatic changes in Wednesday’s official opener, but I did notice significant improvements overall. Here’s a rundown.

Performance times varied in the previews, but one thing that stuck was audience members overwhelmingly pointing to the show being too long. “The length of it had such a negative impact, I started to see flaws in almost every aspect of it,” said one preview attendee, Sarah Carroll of Minneapolis, who also attended Wednesday’s premiere and applauded the shortening.

Some of the details below will explain how they trimmed it down to 2½ hours for opening night, but the overall effect was the biggest improvement from previews.

The first preview featured a medley performed by the act called Apollonia 6, midway through Act 1, that included the Prince B-side “17 Days” and the Sheila E-popularized “A Love Bizarre.” That montage of tunes was cut to just one on opening night, “Nasty Girl,” which Prince wrote for the group that would become Apollonia 6. Otherwise, the song selections seemed mostly untouched.

While the film’s other two leads, Rachel Webb (Apollonia) and Jared Howelton (Morris), showed off their Broadway-seasoned chops right out of the gate in the first preview, theater newcomer Kris Kollins — picked for his obvious music talent —definitely showed room for improvement as an actor. There’s still room, too, but he came off more natural and less melodramatic on Wednesday, an impressive progression for just three weeks’ time — and still eons better than the on-screen performance Prince gave in 1984.

The crew also took advantage of those three test-run weeks. In previews, it was sometimes hard to decipher actors’ dialogue around music snippets, especially near the top of the show when several characters are being introduced while the Revolution is on stage performing at the First (the musical’s name for the club modeled after First Avenue). Also, the scene where the Kid and Apollonia go for a thrilling motorcycle ride felt more like a boring mobility scooter excursion in the first preview but was livened up with better effects on opening night, including lightning added to the lighting. Purple, of course.

Some lines were outright cut, but the bigger difference on opening night seemed to be that the dialogue just got a lot faster. The actors talked more like New Yorkers than Minnesotans. Sometimes they even sounded a little too rushed, as if they were in a hurry to get to that night’s afterparty at the First — er, First Ave. But the hurried approach beat the many moments that dragged during previews.