Featured Photo: A promotional image of Purple Reign: The Prince Tribute Show taken from the group’s Facebook page. If you own this photo and would like it to be removed, email us at cjay@sbctb.org.
We’ve had plenty of rain in Shreveport-Bossier lately, but none of it (as far as I know) has been purple. That’s about to change. During a two-week period, fans of the artist formerly known as Prince will have two opportunities to re-live the Purple Rain era. The 29th annual Let the Good Times Roll Festival has just posted that they’ll have Morris Day and The Time performing on Sunday, June 21 in Festival Plaza. Two weeks later, on Independence Day, Sam’s Town Hotel & Casino has Purple Reign: The Prince Tribute Show.
To folks who are not fans of the Purple One, a tribute act may not seem like big news. But if you’ve got a Prince superfan in your life, chances are good that you already know about the Purple Reign tribute show. This show goes all-in on the scandalous, sex-crazed Prince persona, with a busload of performers and costume changes (they even have a guy who plays Jerome, who brings the guy playing Morris Day his mirror). I can’t embed many of the photographs from their website’s multimedia gallery, for obvious reasons, but I’ll link to them and let you decide whether or not to click. Purple Reign takes the stage at Sam’s Town Hotel & Casino at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 4. Tickets are $15-$25, and can be purchased here.
A good warm-up for Purple Reign would be seeing the real-life Morris Day and The Time perform at the Let the Good Times Roll Festival in downtown Shreveport’s Festival Plaza on Sunday, June 21. Morris Day and The Time are among the list of performers recently posted to the festival’s website. This year’s festival line-up (which doesn’t include show times, unfortunately) features lots of familiar faces from recent years, including outlandishly-dressed crooner Bigg Robb (think of him as the Cee Lo Green of Southern Soul), zydeco artists Chris Ardoin and Keith Frank, and much more. If we had to guess (and sometimes, with this festival, you do have to guess), we’d guess that Morris Day and The Time are in the headliner slot on Sunday night, and will likely perform at 9:15 p.m. or 10:30 p.m.
