Starring: Prince, Cat, Sheila E., Dr. Fink, Wally Safford, Greg Brooks, Sheena Easton

It’s time to party with The Deuce like it’s… 2025!!  As in: Two-Thousand Zero Twenty-Five!! In that, we could all die any day – ’tis nigh high time to open your eyes and ears and with witless wonder bear witness to – a SIGN “☮️” THE TIMES!  Writer/director/star/Maestro Prince’s 1987-era musical manifesto Concert Film (capital “C”, capital “F”) cavalcade of choreographed, costumed, consummate consummation of stage-strutting splendor! Searing! Steamy! Sexy! Sleazy! A harbinger for the year to come!! New Year! New U! New Deuce!! Same OLD Deuce-Dummies… ready to roar!!

A watershed of jaw-dropping show-stopping that Slate mag proclaims to be “the single-greatest concert film of all time” – a sentiment much echoed elsewhere – only ever (if ever) edged from top-slot by Demme and The Talking Heads’ STOP MAKING SENSE… equally behemoth and yet altogether different beast… SIGN “☮️” THE TIMES is His Royal Badness at his (arguably) Bestness!! And despite what the naysayers may naysay – to whit: it being “fake” as a “concert film” as per the bulk being shot on Prince’s personal concert-hall sized Paris soundstage due to The Purple One having pshaw’d parts of the previously filmed live Rotterdam footage as not being up to his particulars – the pulse-pounding PERFORMANCE (more than deserving of its all-capitalization) is pure preening High Priest Of Pop perfection… pitched at a pinnacle of all-outness on every level… “makes Michael Jackson look like he’s nailed to the floor…”!!

While opening to critical raves if not so boffo box-office returns in more haughty halls the likes of Broadway’s Warner or the Village’s Art Greenwich, it was when it hit the eponymous Times Square Theater when the party really started as though 1987 was instead the year of 1999 – where everybody, everybody said “PARTY’!!

(ed. Despite the preponderance of references/allusions to the Prince song “1999” peppered throughout these program notes, the aforementioned number – despite its having been part of the live stage show – is for some bizarre reason NOT performed in the aforementioned film… as per Prince’s perhaps perfunctory design of said film being a kind of “promo” for the also for some bizarre reason “under-performing” double album of the same name… oops! outta time! ✌️+💜)