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.

Continue reading →

Prince of Broadway

23 October 2015 (Fri), Tokyo

Harold Prince has apparently been shopping around the idea of a retrospective of his life on Broadway for years without much success. The plan was to feature samples from his amazingly varied 60-year career not, I had understood, as a song-by-song compilation like Jerome Robbins Broadway but as something brand new that would provide a different perspective on the shows and a broad idea of what it means when the name Harold Prince is on the marquee. He’s got quite a list to choose from: he’s been responsible for some of the most iconic musicals in the history of Broadway, and his contribution to the development of the art form either as producer or director is immense. But backers were understandably wary. It’s a lot easier to understand a show centered on a choreographer or songwriter or performer than on a director, whose input is not as obvious. A Prince recap seemed a fantastic chance to give the rest of us an idea of what the director’s function actually is, though I’m not sure if that would be so interesting to anyone other than us musical freaks. Continue reading →