Tag Archives: Harold Prince

Prince of Broadway: Wish List

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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 look back: Tokyo’s Prince of Broadway

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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.

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Prince of Broadway

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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 →