Face of Nation : Harold Prince, a Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musicaltheater with such groundbreaking shows as “The Phantom of the Opera,” ”Cabaret,” ”Company” and “Sweeney Todd” and won a staggering 21 Tony Awards, has died. Prince was 91.
Prince’s publicist Rick Miramontez said Prince died Wednesday after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland. Prince was known for his fluid, cinematic director’s touch and was unpredictable and uncompromising in his choice of stage material. He often picked challenging, offbeat subjects to musicalize, such as a murderous, knife-wielding barber who baked his victims in pies or the 19th-century opening of Japan to the West.
Along the way, he helped create some of Broadway’s most enduring musical hits, first as a producer of such shows as “The Pajama Game,” ”Damn Yankees,” ”West Side Story,” ”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He later became a director, overseeing such landmark musicals as “Cabaret,” ”Company,” ”Follies,” ”Sweeney Todd,” ”Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”
Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone Wednesday, told The Associated Press that it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to musical theater. “All of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him.”
Lloyd Webber recalled that, as a young man, he had written the music for the flop “Jeeves” and was feeling low. Prince wrote him a letter urging him not to be discouraged. The two men later met and Lloyd Webber said he was thinking of next doing a musical about Evita Peron. Prince told him to bring it to him first. “That was game-changing for me. Without that, I often wonder where I would be,” Lloyd Webber said.
In addition to Lloyd Webber, Prince, known by friends as Hal, worked with some of the best-known composers and lyricists in musical theater, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and, most notably, Stephen Sondheim.
“I don’t do a lot of analyzing of why I do something,” Prince once told The Associated Press. “It’s all instinct.” Only rarely, he said, did he take on an idea just for the money, and they “probably were bad ideas in the first place. Theater is not about that. It is about creating something. The fact that some of my shows have done so well is sheer luck.”
“I’ve had a unique life in the theater, uniquely lucky,” Prince said in his midlife autobiography, “Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre,” which was published in 1974. “I went to work for George Abbott in 1948, and I was fired on Friday that year from a television job in his office. I was rehired the following Monday, and I’ve never been out of work since.”
Born in New York on Jan. 30, 1928, Prince was the son of affluent parents, for whom Saturday matinees in the theater with their children were a regular occurrence. A production of “Julius Caesar” starring Orson Welles when he was 8 taught him there was something special about theater.
“I’ve had theater ambitions all of my life,” he said in his memoir. “I cannot go back so far that I don’t remember where I wanted to work.” After a stint in the Army during the Korean War (he kept his dog-tags on his office desk), he returned to Broadway, serving as stage manager on Abbott’s 1953 production of “Wonderful Town,” starring Rosalind Russell.
The following year, he started producing with Griffith. Their first venture, “The Pajama Game,” starring John Raitt and Janis Paige, was a big hit, running 1,063 performances. They followed in 1955 with another musical smash, “Damn Yankees,” featuring Gwen Verdon as the seductive Lola.
In 1957, Prince did “West Side Story,” a modern-day version of “Romeo and Juliet” told against the backdrop of New York gang warfare. Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins and with a score by Bernstein and Sondheim, it, too, was acclaimed.
Yet even its success was dwarfed by “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964), which Prince produced and Robbins directed and choreographed. Set in Czarist Russia, the Bock-Harnick musical starred Zero Mostel as the Jewish milkman forced to confront challenges to his way of life. Prince had gotten his first opportunity to direct on Broadway in 1962. The musical was “A Family Affair,” a little-remembered show about the travails of a Jewish wedding. Its Broadway run was short — only 65 performances — but “A Family Affair” gave Prince a chance to work with composer John Kander.
