A look back: Tokyo’s Prince of Broadway

I see they’re going ahead with Prince of Broadway, the long-aborning retrospective of producer/director Harold Prince’s estimable career in the theater. While noting (and hoping) that the show may have been dramatically transformed since then, I recall that the preliminary version that played in Tokyo in October 2015, reviewed here, was mainly a succession of I-produced-this-I-directed-that musical scenes plucked from his various shows and recreated with little or no context. It was like a Wikipedia entry on stage, a list of disembodied names and songs. As I noted then:

The numbers are nearly all famous songs presented with costumes and scenery reminiscent of their shows but no background whatsoever. So we get an old guy with a milk cart wishing he were rich, a painted emcee welcoming us to a nightclub, a woman in a chair pouting about clowns, a gravelly voiced woman who wants to propose a toast, a man in a prison cell babbling about dressing up mannequins, and so forth. Not remotely interesting to anyone who doesn’t know these shows and songs…and not particularly interesting to me, a big musical buff who’s seen this all before.

And:

Nothing wrong with those songs, of course, but I don’t know that I needed to sit through yet another version of “Wilkommen” or “Music of the Night” in the usual staging. Those of us that know the shows would enjoy something new, and those that don’t know the shows wouldn’t care. The song selection was questionable in any case in terms of shining some light on the shows themselves: for example, there would be no way of knowing that West Side Story has any dance at all from the numbers here (“Something’s Coming” and “Tonight”).

The number-on-number approach worked with Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, a compilation of dance scenes by the choreographer, whose dances often told a whole story in themselves. It’s much easier to understand the contribution of a choreographer or composer than a producer or director – that’s why Sondheim has had umpteen compilation shows and Prince zero. The Prince show seemed a good job to educate us. What does he see in a show that makes him think it will work as a musical, such as labor disputes (The Pajama Game) or murderers (Sweeney Todd)? How does he choose the creative team? How does he shape the material, such as the unusual structures of Cabaret, Company, Pacific Overtures and Evita? I remember him talking about turning Damn Yankees into a hit by switching the posters from a baseball theme to Gwen Verdon in tights, or Forum into a hit simply by changing the opening number, or dispensing with the fiddler from much of Fiddler on the Roof. Songs could have been presented in that context. Each show must have its own story. It would have been nice to hear his thoughts about his remarkable collaboration with Stephen Sondheim in the 1970s, for instance, or why he thinks some shows succeeded while others failed.

That is, as I stated,

“What’s missing here is Prince. What was his part in all this? Prince was surely as much a creator as the authors themselves, but that was not evident on the stage tonight.”

When I interviewed John Weidman some years ago, I mentioned that it must be frustrating to hear Pacific Overtures described as a Sondheim musical. After all, I said, it had two creators. “No,” he replied instantly, “it had three” – and he credited Prince as the driving force behind the entire project. In addition to being an extremely generous appreciation of the director’s role, the remark suggests that Prince’s contribution went beyond the simple staging into something more fundamental. That is the show I wanted to see. (Whether Prince gets royalties for his efforts is another story, of course – and maybe that’s a topic for the show as well.)  I said:

I somehow had visions of the curtains opening to a bunch of characters from various Prince shows singing each other’s songs – a masked phantom singing “Sunrise Sunset”, a Fleet Street barber doing “Hey There” and such – but, okay, I’m no artist. . . In other words, they could take a more kaleidoscopic view of the numbers, tying them together by theme, rather than a he-sang-this and she-danced-that style. Anything, really, to give us a view of Prince as an active presence in the shows as opposed to a name on the Playbill.

Harold Prince deserves a show of his own, but unless that show is something innovative in its own right, I have to wonder where they’re going to find the audiences when a majority of theatergoers know nothing further back than Cats (or in Prince’s case, Phantom). I’ll be interested to see what they’ve come up with.

UPDATE: Here are my ideas for a retrospective.