Prince’s Foray Into Musical Theater Found Him At His Most Frustrated And Adventurous

Prince-Ulysses
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The impact Prince had on music was undeniable, and since his sudden, untimely passing , he’s been mourned the world over. Everyone from late show hosts to meteorologists and even his old band have come together to honor his memory. His fans, new and old, are buying so many of his albums that they’ve re-entered the Billboard charts, claiming the top two spots in half-a-day. Even his imperfect, but definitively Prince-ly, motion picture debut, Purple Rain, is enjoying a theatrical re-release.

Still, not all of Prince’s endeavors are as fondly remembered. Back in 1993, Prince had put together a stage show called Glam Slam Ulysses, a combination of live performances from actors and dancers mixed with pre-recorded video that told the story of Homer’s Odyssey, accompanied by 13 new Prince songsIn August and September of that year, Prince held a limited run of performances in his Los Angeles club, Glam Slam West, with the intention of taking the act on the road. The tour itself never came to pass, thanks in part to the show being panned by the few critics who saw it.

To put Glam Slam Ulysses into a bit of context: 1993 was a frustrating year for Prince creatively. He was unhappy with his label, Warner Bros., which resulted in him changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol to help him circumvent his contract while allowing him to focus on other creative endeavors. It was during this time that he began working on a CD-Rom, titled Prince Interactive, that aimed to give his fans a more immersive experience.

This embrace of technology helped lead him to the idea of a kind of interactive stage show, where performers interface with both pre-recorded video as well as the audience in attendance. To helm the project, Prince hired choreographer Jamie King, who had worked as a dancer for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous tour in 1992, to redesign his stage show.

King told Variety in 2011 that this redesign meant getting a new song from Prince every Monday, which would then have to be ready for the stage complete with choreography, stage design, and costumes by the following Friday. These performances were put on at his club Glam Slam West, and Prince would fly in and watch the progress every week from his private VIP booth. Years later, King spoke highly of the process, saying that Prince had “no sense of limitation, and he forces you to think that way too.”

An excerpt from the biography Prince: A Life in Music, describes the show’s unique multimedia approach.

On a large screen behind the stage, a beastly cyclops hurls boulders while a live actor bounded across the platform, defending himself with a giant sexy love symbol. Dancers in brightly feathered costumes posed as lotus flowers and showered the audiences with spritzes of perfume. Reproductive mutants scrambled across the floor, and the video display showed an epic struggle in the club’s bathroom stall.

If you’re trying to imagine what something like this might look like, there are a handful of videos available online.

Outside of his songs, Prince didn’t appear in the production, and despite the ambition that went into it, the reviews were not kind. It was described as a “feebly ambitious Fame-cum-Solid Gold-dancers workshop” by critic Ernest Hardy, “simply silly” by the LA Times, and Uptown Weekly said that “Prince’s pretensions once again overshadow his talent.” While it was billed as an interactive event, Variety called it a “naively boring production” and an example of Prince having “sacrificed his instinctive musical gifts in favor of disposable, multi-media excesses.”

Another biography, Prince: A Man and His Music, described the project as “easy to mock” and derided the show for having “no clear connection between the various parts of The Odyssey being dramatized and the songs written in each section.” Reviews weren’t much kinder to King’s co-star Carmen Electra, who had signed a deal with Prince’s label, Purple Paisley Records, in 1991. She played the dual role of Penelope and Calypso, and was written off by LA Weekly as Prince’s latest infatuation.

With the negative reviews piling up, Prince abandoned the project altogether, though he kept Jamie King on board to help choreograph and direct his performance for the American Music Awards later that year. King’s work was noticed by Madonna, who was sitting in the audience that night, and King would go on to becoming one of the most sought after pop-music choreographers in the industry.

The 13 songs written for Glam Slam Ulysses were all eventually released over a handful of albums over the next five years, the bulk of them on 1994’s Come. By 2000, his contract with Warner Bros. expired, and felt he was able to approach his music on his own terms, as well as began going by Prince once again.

The stage show is mostly remembered as an interesting footnote in Prince’s storied career as an innovator and musician now (if it’s remembered at all), but even if it was a misguided attempt at one of his countless career reinventions, it still shows how open he was to trying something new, and that’s a dedication to originality that is uncommon and bound to be missed.

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