• Harold Prince’s final bow

It is frustrating that the last show presented by Harold Prince, the immensely influential Broadway producer and director who died yesterday at 91, will be the misconceived retrospective of his career, Prince of Broadway, that played mercifully short runs in Japan in 2015 and on Broadway in 2017.

That career is eminently worthy of a retrospective, encompassing some of the greatest musicals in Broadway history. Indeed, it is arguable that the entire trajectory of musical theater would have been different without him. As director, he changed the look and feel of musicals with productions like Cabaret, Company and Evita that took on weightier themes and bolder approaches than what was then the standard fare, changing the game for all subsequent musicals. The history of Broadway in the second half of the 20th century can’t be written without him.

Some articles have mentioned the ephemeral nature of the director’s work, but they lose sight of the enormous contribution that a good director makes in helping the writers shape a show. That is, the work itself reflects the invisible hand of the director as it comes together from vague idea to physical production, and Harold Prince was the master crafter as his extraordinary string of hits will attest. As he explains in his memoirs, his career is sadly unlikely to be duplicated in the future given the corporate takeover of the musical world, making his story equally important as a picture of a lost world.

Prince of Broadway was an opportunity wasted, as noted here and here. Challenged by friends to come up with my own take, I offered a few ideas here, and this is as good a time as any to repeat them. So here they are again below; these are just sketches, but readers should get the idea. In any event, I only hope that someone somewhere is working on a showcase for this Broadway great.

*****

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.

**********

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”.

**********

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.