Reviewing Prince of Broadway in Tokyo a few years back, I had made some suggestions on how the creators might have approached the material. I had been hoping for interesting tidbits on the art of producing/directing or even backstage stories rather than just random songs in their original stagings. Harold Prince wanted to present the “arc” of his shows by staging representative numbers, but setting aside whether that’s even possible, that’s not what we got, at least in Tokyo (does “The Ladies Who Lunch” really show the arc of Company, for example?).  And it’s not necessarily what we wanted.

With the show on Broadway now (apparently in much the same format), I’ve been asked — challenged, really — to elaborate. I like a dare, so here are a few examples of the kind of show I would have liked to have seen. I don’t pretend to be a writer – I took these from vague recollections of articles and interviews with a few quotes thrown in and made up most of the rest – but I wasn’t as interested in the details as in conveying the general concept. Hopefully it will get the point across.

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A life-sized version of the original baseball-themed poster of Damn Yankees is shown on stage right.

Prince

The difference between hit and flop can come in unexpected places. For example, there we were with a major musical, Damn Yankees, playing on Broadway. And audiences were not showing up.

Griffith

I don’t get it. With material like this, we should be a smash. What are we doing wrong?

Prince

Let’s think. What is this show about?

Abbott

It’s about a hapless baseball team that needs a good batter.

Prince

Hmm, what else?

Griffith

It’s about a fanatic Yankees fan who’d sell his soul to the devil for a World Series championship.

Prince

And?

Abbott

A devil pops in and takes up the offer.

Prince

Okay, and?

Griffith

The devil sends a gorgeous, half-dressed, nearly irresistible woman to seduce the guy.

Prince

There it is! Take away the baseball…

Light goes off on the old poster.

Prince

…and put in the gorgeous, nearly irresistible woman.

Light rises instead on the familiar poster with a sexy Gwen Verdon at stage left.

Prince

(addresses audience) And we never looked back.

Gwen Verdon

(stepping out of poster) Nearly irresistible? Mr Prince, don’t make me brag.

Sings “A Little Brains, A Little Talent”, making sure her charms are appreciated by the men on stage.

 

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Prince

Another talent is to know what projects are right for you and what aren’t. They offered me Hello, Dolly!, but I couldn’t figure out why waiters would be welcoming a woman back to a place she’s never been. I told them I was the wrong person. And then there was when Andrew Lloyd Webber brought me his latest. (Andrew enters, Prince turns to him) So these cats, they’re a metaphor then?

Lloyd Webber

(Lady Bracknell-like) A metaphor?

Prince

Some kind of British metaphor. Is one of them Disraeli? Queen Victoria? Is this about British politics?

Lloyd Webber

Hal, dear, I’m afraid it’s about cats. (exits)

Prince

So I was the wrong person for that show too. But I’ve been the right person often enough. And my first rule is to establish just what a show is about.

Performer 1

(enters, light rises on poster for Cabaret) An American man and English woman fall in love in wartime Berlin.

Prince

(thinks, finds it) An allegory of the rise of the Nazis!

Performer 2

(enters, light rises on poster for Sweeney Todd) A mad barber murders his customers and turns them into meat pies.

Prince

The dehumanization of man in industrialized society!

Performer 3

(enters, light rises on poster for Evita) The rise of Eva Peron in Argentina.

Prince

A parable warning against the perniciousness of media hype!

Performer 4

(enters, light rises on poster for She Loves Me) Bickering colleagues discover they have been secret pen pals and fall in love.

Prince

Bickering colleagues discover they have been secret pen pals and fall in love!

Performers 1-4

Huh??

Prince

(shrugs) Sometimes a love story is just a love story.

Performer 5 enters and orchestra begins.

Prince

(yelling over orchestra) This is what I did instead of Dolly. (all exit)

Performer 5

Sings “Tonight at Eight”.

 

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Prince

It didn’t take long to learn that nothing in a show is more important than the opening number. It sets the tone for the audience, lets them know what’s coming. In West Side Story, Jerry Robbins opened the show with rival gangs facing off in dance. That told us we’re going to get a stylized piece, showing audiences right away what they were in for.

Brief finger-snapping dance by a couple of gang members.

Then a few shows later, we had a near-death experience. The show was a riotous farce with a setting in ancient Rome and a heart in the Catskills. It had a brilliant book, wonderful music and great comic actors. Everything but an audience – there were a dozen people at one point in a theater of 1,200. We were desperate. So we called in Jerry again.

Jerome Robbins

(enters) Your opening stinks. Write a comedy number. (exit)

Prince

Jerry was nothing if not blunt. But he was right. Steve Sondheim wrote a farcical opening number, Jerry staged it brilliantly, and with that single change, we had a smash hit.

Brief piece of “Comedy Tonight”, ending with a pie in the face or such.

Prince

And there was Fiddler on the Roof.

Several performers enter singing brief bit of “Tradition”.

Prince

That opening song, “Tradition”, in Jerry’s staging transformed what could have been a standard melodrama about a country couple aiming to marry off their daughters into a universal theme of how to survive in a changing world. It helped make the show the longest-running musical in Broadway history. That’s been passed since, of course – but that’s a story for later.

Prince 1

(enters) A lot of my shows start not with the story but with intro numbers like those to set the stage. There was the entire company singing “Company”. (photo from production, ditto below)

Prince 2

(enters) A Kabuki narrator opening Pacific Overtures.

Prince 3

(enters) The balladeer of Sweeney Todd.

Prince 4

And before all those shows, we had one of the greatest openings of them all.

Emcee

(enters, sings “Wilkommen” with all the Princes)

 

*****

Prince

For me, set design is a form of co-authorship. I have to know what a show looks like before I can even begin to direct. Theater is an empty space, and it’s both limited and unlimited because the space is the space, but what you can do with people’s imaginations is really endless. The big mirror above the stage in Cabaret (production photo, as below); Company’s moving platforms and elevators – the set actually inspired some of the songs; the factory setting for Sweeney Todd. The set and material feed off each other in a positive way.

On the other hand, Phantom, known as a big spectacle, is basically just a big black box with lots of fancy props. Yes, yes, there’s that chandelier – but believe it or not, with a few exceptions, what you see is mainly your imagination.

(Phantom and Christine enter, sing “Music of the Night”)

*****

Prince

So there I was, a big shot producer at 30, all of my first five shows big hits, the latest being West Side Story, which you may have heard of, and Fiorello, which won a Tony, a Pulitzer and everything else you could think of. The guy can’t miss, right? Well, life doesn’t work that way. We took the same marvelous team from Fiorello with the wrong source material and the wrong star. It flopped. As did my next three shows.

Don’t worry, I got back on my feet quickly enough. But as a producer, a director, an investor, the big question is how do you tell the next hit from the next flop? After years of experience, I’ll tell you: I don’t know. I do a show about a Jewish milkman in Russia, and it becomes a massive hit. I do a show about Superman, an American icon, and it fails. I can tell you why my last show didn’t work, but I can’t tell you about the next show. That’s the way it goes on Broadway. (pauses) Shame about Superman, though.

Clark Kent and Lois Lane enter, sing “You’ve Got Possibilities”.

*****

Prince

Then there’s Steve Sondheim. We met at the opening of South Pacific back when I was 20 and he was 18 – yeah, we were young once. We’d saved each other a few times in the years since: I produced West Side Story for him when his show was flailing, and he brought Jerome Robbins into Forum when I was flailing. But I’d never directed one of his shows until 1970, when we were in our 40s. And we didn’t let up for another decade. We had a plotless musical in neurotic New York, Grand Guignol in England, a romantic comedy in Sweden, Kabuki in 19th-century Japan – we had fun.

Medley of numbers from Prince-Sondheim shows.

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So there are my ideas for the next Harold Prince retrospective. For what it’s worth.