And we figured that the way to do that was to do a show as elegantly as it required, but cheaper in terms of cost than anybody was doing them, and get the money back to the investors as soon as possible. Those people who do not recognize it in a comfortable way are the same people who were walking out on West Side Story. Hits are shows that do well at the box office, and some of them, I wouldn’t want my name on. Beginning with the 2020 ceremony, the Drama Desk Awards will honor the memory of Harold Prince with the presentation of the Harold Prince Award, recognizing an … Prince was born Harold Smith Jr. in Manhattan on Jan. 30, 1928, to Harold Sr. and Blanche (Stern) Smith. That’s the show that first brought them to Broadway, and he brought it in because it got such good reviews. Honestly, I didn’t think it was clear. Sweeney Todd is widely considered the pinnacle of Prince and Sondheim’s collaboration. It was not my game plan. There certainly are detractors who think, “Why did he bother?” but I bothered because it made it possible for me to direct it, and I did a good job. I liked impressionistic plays. They came in and sat down, they could see this distorted view of themselves, and it’s like saying, “That’s your metaphor, folks!” Sort of like the factory in Sweeney. I loved it. I thought, “He’s going to hate this. A list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince who has died aged 91. Monday morning, I heard a shout from his office, and he said, “Will you come in here? It just exhausted me. Make a list of the landmarks of the American musical theater over the last half century — West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera — and you’ll find Harold Prince behind every one of them. I think we were hurt by a decade of what seemed to everybody like unceasing success and too many awards and too much publicity that you don’t seek. So I sat down, listened to all of it, thought it was all marvelous, and wrote a 3,000-word letter saying what I thought should happen and what I would love to do, and I got back a letter saying, “We’re doing a record, and your letter’s terrific, but it is going to slow us down and just make us lose confidence. It’s not that you don’t deserve more. So please come back.” He said, “No. They do it with older people playing young people. Eric Schaeffer did a production here that they thought would get to Broadway. The only thing is, if you look at the billing, you will see it says “Directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins,” and that was my doing. It’s hard to believe, but there are some very successful ones who are not articulate and who are reduced to saying, “No, that’s not what I want. The Harold Prince Award will be bestowed annually for outstanding contributions to theater, and the posthumous award will be given in his honor this year. You were at the premiere of West Side Story. On the Town was a musical that Comden and Green wrote. You’ve been associated with so many legendary shows, as producer and director — from West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret, to Evita and Phantom of the Opera. And so, a little Iago-like, I whispered in his ear, “Let’s move on.” That appealed to him. That was the beginning. When you read them, it doesn’t seem to be happening, though she is very interested.” So I read seven plays, and I said, “Well, you know, all I could see reading them — he writes great, Steve — but all I could see was Kim Stanley running to make costume and wig changes and makeup changes. Or are you caving in to the audience? Harold Prince: Yes, for sure. Rosalind Russell, the big movie star, was the leading lady. It hurts my energy level. On Broadway, it played to sold-out houses, season after season. New Girl in Town, a musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s somber drama Anna Christie, found Abbott and Prince working again with star Verdon and choreographer Fosse. Prince was drafted into the Army in 1950; he served in Germany, where he soaked up atmosphere he would later draw on for his groundbreaking production of Cabaret. You needed to go in there and say, “I’ve just lost all my problems,” all the years of patina that have developed, and crust, and just be in this other world, and insofar as it does that, it seems to have succeeded in its objective. It’s a sort of Brechtian style, and the energy of it really worked for all of us, and this show worked immediately in London. I knew John Dexter, the playwright, an Englishman, a very talented guy. It’s a hell of a complicated play in which people carry masks and confront each other behind masks, then put the masks down and you hear what they are really thinking. Harold Prince: It can be. Tim was working on Chess, and Andrew wanted to do Phantom of the Opera. Robert Griffith died in 1961, and Prince continued on his own, supported by an army of loyal investors. And then I got a job very early. I still think that was right, but they’ve never brought it all the way back. (1957) Stage Play: West Side Story. He too wanted to direct. A list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince who has died aged 91. It’s in the repertoire, and it’s been done in San Francisco with Plácido. Oddly enough, it has never been done (that way) since. His work on Candide earned him that year’s Tony for Best Direction of a Musical, and a special award for Distinguished Contribution to the Advancement of the Musical Theater. Harold Prince: Childhood is painful. When it first opened, 100 people walked out on that show every night for a year. It worked in that case. We said, “We will do this show, but you cannot call us and talk to us about any of your problems. One is Steve said, “I won’t write Company unless you agree to do Follies right after it,” because Follies was ready and Company wasn’t. Between theatrical adventures with Stephen Sondheim, Prince enjoyed a nostalgic foray into traditional musical comedy, On the Twentieth Century, with his fellow Abbott alumni, Comden and Green. The Harold Prince Award will be bestowed annually for outstanding contributions to theater, and the posthumous award will be given in his honor this year. The blood boils, and it’s exciting, and the Romeo and Juliet story is pretty swell. The Prince and Sondheim team returned with a vengeance in Sweeney Todd (1979). I was aware of that. The show introduced a number of new talents to the Broadway stage: the composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. We’ve had mixed reviews and some spectacular exponents of this form and the way this show works. He died at 107, oh 12, 13 years ago. They leaped at the chance to work with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on their dream project, a Romeo and Juliet story, set among New York street gangs. I have two left feet, but my direction is characterized, I think, in some of the best work, by movement, and by how I will move a block of people you would call an ensemble or a chorus. All of this reality television, and the business of being copycats all the time, that was something you didn’t want to do. They were in the profits right away, so not only were they thrilled with the hits, they were thrilled with the return they were making on their money. In a career spanning more than fifty years, Prince has received ten Drama Desk Awards as Outstanding Director and 21 Tony Awards® for Best Direction, Best Producer, Best Musical, and Lifetime … Furth’s book is wonderful and a little complicated in places. The pairing is fitting. There was theater. There were a lot of great playwrights around. Every country held on to that tradition, and the show succeeded because of it. Harold Prince: Well, that takes you back to where I went to theater when I was eight years old. You can’t copy West Wide Story. I loved O’Neill. “The great golden curtain at the Met…” the old Met on 37th Street, “…has gone up. I had never rehearsed in the afternoon. You can stop that now.”. Today, you can’t do a straight play for $800,000. Harold Prince holds one of his 21 Tony awards. At an early age, he was taken to Broadway shows by his theater-loving parents, and he soon discovered a lifelong calling. The Harold Prince Award. He was in the movie, Kiss Me Kate, as one of the dancers. Abbott, Fosse, Adler and Ross all returned for a second hit production, which made a star of dancer and comedienne Gwen Verdon and brought Griffith and Prince their second Tony Award for Best Musical. It’s about revenge, and I don’t think I am a vengeful guy. It’s based on a book by the marvelous Austrian novelist named Joseph Roth, who wrote The Radetzky March, which is a great novel. A list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince who has died aged 91. It turned into the biggest hit of the season instantly, which was a wonderful thing. That kind of acting, I’ll do. Then they went back to Jerry, and Jerry said, “Get Hal Prince to produce it.” So I said yes, and that seemed the perfect combination. It worked really well. The Pajama Game (1954) — best musical. In Prince’s hands, cannibalism serves as a metaphor for the excess and exploitation of the early industrial age. Well, where isn’t there tradition? Let me just share two musical plots with you. He wants co-directing credit,” and without a pause, he said, “Give it to him.” I said, “What are you saying? You’ve talked a lot about the collaborative nature of theater. They don’t have an appointment,” and I said, “I’ll look.” I looked. Produced by Frederick Brisson, Robert E. Griffith and Harold Prince. I kept getting reports back saying you had a good rehearsal, you pulled the show together where it was needed, and so on.” So he is the first person who ever said to me, “You really can direct, and you are a director. I do think Citizen Kane is as nourishing to me, a theater director, as anything I have ever done. For many years it held the title of longest-running show in Broadway history. I am also older, and when you get to be my age, you inadvertently get some reaction from people. We did it again on the next show, and we just kept doing it for a while. Harold Prince: Like most of the work, some good reviews, some ghastly reviews. After a bunch of successes at the box office, it gave us the right to have failures that did something we divined was important for the musical theater form. The title of the show shows up at the beginning. He was honoured for both producing and directing as well as with special awards. Harold Prince: I should also mention Orson Welles. Their first venture, Company (1970), was an episodic ensemble piece, depicting the relationships of one bachelor and his circle of married friends, adrift in contemporary Manhattan. Along with Abbott, he co-produced The Pajama Game, which won the 1955 Tony Award for Best Musical. In 1994, Prince scored again with the definitive revival of America’s first musical classic, Show Boat. So it is sort of make your own theater really, and I signed on immediately, and we spent the next two years working on it. The book is by Richard Nelson, who is a great playwright and quite well known here and in England. He has garnered twenty-one Tony Awards, more than any other individual, including eight for directing, eight for producing the year's Best Musical, two as Best Producer of a Musical, and three special awards. It was West Side Story, and it was trying something new in the commercial theater. Note: Thelma Ritter and Gwen both won Tony Awards for Best Actress. Abbott said, “What do you want to do?” and I said, “I would love to ask Jerry if he would be willing to stand by.” “Ask him.” So I asked Robbins, and he said, “Only if I can have co-directing credit,” and I said, “Oops,” but I went back to the office and I said to George, “Mr. Prince won the year’s Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. The show enjoyed a successful run and brought Prince his first Tony nomination as a director, but did not establish a distinct directorial identity for him. Harold Prince: For Company. The amount of kinetic energy I gave off, which was clearly spurred by too much ambition, drove them all a little bit nuts, and they went to Abbott and said, “You know, he’s okay, and he knows what he’s doing, but it’s very abrasive. Instead, I found myself in Indianapolis with the National Guard first and then Fort Bliss, Texas, and then I got sent for my second year to Germany with the occupation forces. We did two shows in a row that were not linear storytelling. Harold Prince’s 18 th Tony Award Win: Best Direction of a Musical. Music by Jerry Bock. “Watch It!” Just “Watch It!” with an exclamation point. Indeed, for Jerry, it was a hymn to his father. They leaped at the chance to work with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on their dream project, a Romeo and Juliet story, set among New York street gangs. I was living in Spain. We hope to talk about all of them, but let’s start with West Side Story. Harold Prince was born on January 30, 1928 in New York City, New York, USA as Harold Smith Prince. You’re in your seventies. The whole creative process is the biggest turn-on in the world, and I like that. It’s just a great musical and very popular, they do it all the time. We came to Washington, to the National (Theatre), and it was spectacular from the get-go in front of audiences. So she had that affection that people have for that sort of thing. My memory is that the only thing that ever got fiddled around with forever was “Somewhere,” which was a song, top of the second act, where Reri Grist, the opera singer, sat in the pit and sang — she wasn’t seen by the audience — and there was a whole big ballet between the Jets and the Sharks. I don’t think I feel revenge. The annual Drama Desk Awards honor outstanding achievement by professional theater artists on Broadway and beyond. So I said to Eugene Lee, “Let’s do it in a factory, and let’s put a glass roof on it that makes it claustrophobic, and let’s tell all of these people that they are in the same spot really as the two leading characters in the play, that they’re all victims of the industrial age.” This is a time when kids were on the assembly line for 14 hours a day doing piecework and so on, and that pulled the whole show together for me. A musical adaptation of ancient Roman farces, the show starred Zero Mostel, and was directed by the ageless George Abbott, with a last-minute assist from Jerome Robbins. The heroine came out on stage in the second act without a beanie, and the audience went nuts laughing. Harold Prince is a legend in the American theatre – the acclaimed director and producer behind a long list of America’s most iconic musicals and the winner of a staggering, record-breaking 21 Tony Awards. Over the next decade he had a string of hits that included Damn Yankees (1955), Fiorello! I’ll listen to it again,” and I did open the season and it stayed in the repertoire. It’s just not good from an investor’s point of view, and we’re going to renegotiate all your contracts.” Long pause. On returning from the service, Prince went back to work for George Abbott, stage-managing Wonderful Town, a show that reunited composer Bernstein with lyricists Comden and Green. I think you want to be visible on that stage, and that happened. You can have vaudeville numbers separated from the book. That same year, Prince finally revived his partnership with Stephen Sondheim to direct Sondheim’s musical Bounce at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. You have to like to give and take. The award winning director-producer reflects on his past work, Trump and the state of Broadway. Company took home a Tony for Best Musical and another Best Director prize for Prince. Abbott…” in those days, “No go. Abbott also directed the show, with assistance from Jerome Robbins. The Harold Prince Award will be bestowed annually for outstanding contributions to theater, and the posthumous award will be given in his honor this year. So we did do that, and he did bring in some money, and we did the rest by doing backers’ auditions. Harold Prince holds his Tony award for best director in a musical for "Show Boat," at Broadway's Minskoff Theater in New Yorkin 1985. No one else who has done it since has ever done that. Sexy. Harold Prince: Yeah, a lot of reading with the flashlight under the covers, and a lot of play reading. So we didn’t have to go over that, and I directed the show. Prince’s show, LoveMusik, about the romance of composer Kurt Weill and actress-singer Lotte Lenya, enjoyed a brief run in New York in 2007. A phenomenally prolific producer, playwright and director, Abbott was known on Broadway as “the Apprentice’s Sorcerer” for his ability to identify and nurture young talent. The first show I ever saw was Orson Welles in the Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar as an eight-year-old. It’s probably just something born in you, but I was very solitary, and I escaped into fantasies. We did a second show the next year called Damn Yankees, and I stage-managed that. The first time you saw, “Steam Heat,” you could see he had a very, very uniquely defined style, with the hats and the whole thing. A big musical this time. In partnership with fellow Abbott protégé Robert E. Griffith, he acquired the rights to a popular novel, 7 1/2 Cents, a comic depiction of a strike in a pajama factory. There was no air-conditioning. If Bobby and I flew into New York, could we all meet and hear the score again?” We wanted to meet with Sondheim, Lenny, Jerry, and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book. Harold Prince is credited as Stage Manager, Director, Producer, Performer, Conception, Writer and Choreographer. Prince’s attention turned to directing, and in 1967 he scored a hit with Cabaret, a dark-hued tale of Berlin night life on the eve of the Nazi takeover. It comes back often, and they just keep changing it. Prince began work in the theatre as an assistant stage manager to theatrical producer and director George Abbott. The pair made history in 1957 with West Side Story, a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story set among rival New York street gangs, with a classic score by composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. An even more ambitious work, Follies (1971), interwove nostalgic musical numbers — evoking America’s theatrical past — with a day in the life of two middle-aged couples. Jerry insisted and insisted and insisted on that opening number being larger, and engulfing a huge audience that wasn’t Jewish, that didn’t know about shtetls and so on. Her husband, Rev. And what about music? Harold Prince, a towering Broadway figure who won 21 Tony Awards as director and producer, has died at 91, his rep says. Show up on time, get the work done. In other words, you could say to the investor — and I would do it in a letter — “I am not certain you’ll ever see this money again, but you’ve been doing just fine,” and then we’d do Follies or Pacific Overtures. Winner of more Tony Awards than anyone else, Harold Prince has collaborated with the theatre greats, including Kander and … Harold Prince: Actually, George Abbott had given Bernstein and Robbins their first big hit, The big place where we encountered this schism was “Officer Krupke.” The authors all said, “What in the hell are all these street kids doing, talking about psychoanalysis? That’s how he told them. My father was on the Stock Exchange, down on Wall Street, and my mother was what they used to call a housewife. Everybody will know who directed the show.” So that is how he got it, and it served to tell the world that Jerome Robbins wanted to be a director. I had written him, coming out of college. Rest in peace, Hal Prince. Some of that stuff is so painful, some of the O’Neill works. You know. Then he let me run the show, and that was when it was pretty evident to me, not anyone else — I was one step ahead of the sheriff — that I was not made to be a stage manager. Have you seen the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company? Pajama Game cost around $69,000. The work was hailed for Sondheim’s score, Prince’s impressionistic staging, and for the work’s sophisticated portrayal of adult relationships. Perfect. Lloyd Webber and his librettist, Tim Rice, had written a musical based on the life of Eva Peron, the charismatic wife of Argentine dictator … A list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince who has died aged 91. I’m not certain. We have never seen this before.”. I think Fiddler on the Roof is the other show that would never have happened today. Preparation is getting everything you need to know of a sensory nature about the characters, where the story is taking place, all those things. It’s time you had a flop,” and walked on down the street smiling. I changed the tempo of the scene changes just slightly, because I felt like it would be better if these overlapped, it would be better if this moved more. Musical Director: Harold Hastings. We had dressers put up $500. Full list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince. A list of Tony Awards won by Harold Prince who has died aged 91. We were living in Majorca, and Tim actually arrived with a tape of this show about Eva Peron, and he played the tape, and I listened, and the opening number, which had been recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra — they had that kind of money to do that — and with a huge chorus, and I said, “This opening is 200,000 people in front of the Casa Rosada at Eva’s funeral. Obit Harold Prince. The size of that whole show was risky, wasn’t it? You’d do a show that you had to do for artistic reasons, that in fact, ultimately, in the case of both of those shows, are somewhat historical, but they never returned a plug nickel to anybody. “We are going to charge them to walk into a theater where there’s nothing on the stage.” And I didn’t have the guts. Although Prince’s first two shows were fun-filled romps in the established George Abbott manner, darker colors were appearing in Prince’s choice of subject matter. Harold Prince: No. I did two more shows, but I always called the cues the way I would have liked them to be. Bobby stopped. That’s a huge thing to learn. You can create something artistic. I can’t see this show in costumes. I think it hurt us. FILE - In this June 4, 1995 file photo, Harold Prince holds his Tony award for best director in a musical for "Show Boat," at Broadway's Minskoff Theater in New York. Book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott. The first play was Angel Street. Your career as a director really took off with Cabaret. Harold Prince: I have not seen Company. I don’t think we could have turned it down. That’s as far as my imagination would take me, but I’ll tell you what, it’s a musical.” And he said, “It is?” and he called George and we met in my office, and I said, “Yes, guys. One was called Too Many Girls, a big hit of Rodgers and Hart. Be a director.”. He had been on film. Music by Jerry Bock. My partner had died by then, and I was alone and fearful. Are you ready to do the show?” and I said, “Sure.”. In 1965, Prince produced one more show with his old friend George Abbott directing: In the 1970s, Prince embarked on an intense collaboration with his old friend. The Korean War started, and I was the first person drafted in Manhattan, because I had missed out on World War II, and it took me away for two years and calmed me down. Our rehearsals started at 10:00 every morning in Lambeth, in a school, in a gymnasium, and when I would leave, having staged a section of it, sometimes 12:30, and then I would leave my assistant to review what I’d done, and then Gillian Lynne would take the rest of the time for choreography. I would have loved to have been a playwright and a director, but I am too introspective for writing. Musical. There hasn’t been a romantic musical in years, and that’s what I would like to see.” That’s often a criterion. I read Julie Harris at one point said she used to play with a stage and so on, and lots of playwrights have done that, and I did. I admired him enormously because he played games with theater, and he knew traditional Japanese theater and German theater and Russian theater, and he used all of those techniques. He went on to direct his own productions in 1962 beginning with A Family Affairand had a series of unsuccessful productions. Well, long may you direct and produce. The Princes have two children — daughter, Daisy, a theater director; and son, Charles Prince, a conductor. Harold Smith "Hal" Prince is an American theatrical producer and director associated with many of the best-known Broadway musical productions of the past half-century. Prince received the Best Director Tony again. Try something else.” I wouldn’t be one of those guys. Prince was now ready to devote himself to directing, and his next show established his reputation for daring subject matter and unconventional staging. But then, when I was finished, he said, “We’ve lost our producer. This is just not what he’s been doing at all.” So…. You can’t even copy Phantom of the Opera, though God knows a lot of people have tried, trying to do Dracula or the Hunchback, but you can’t. Another collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind, closed before coming to Broadway, but the indefatigable Prince undertook one of his most daring ventures, Parade (1998), a musical retelling of the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia. I got it as I went along. I recognize its existence. When you first start directing — the very first job I ever got, which was a stock job, directing — you do little drawings of where you want your actors to go in the scenery. Harold Prince: Yeah. Griffith and Prince had earned a reputation for bringing their shows in on a tight budget, paying off their investors early, and taking a hands-on approach to every detail of their productions. Ben Cross and Ian … I should have done that, and you know, I regret it. The fact that it is all heightened and people are not real and they are not really saying what they would have said in the words they would have used, I think that would have been an impossible task and inappropriate. So I did an interview, and I was asked, ‘What do you want to do?” and I said, “I want to try directing operas.” I got a telegram in Europe from Carol Fox, who ran the Chicago Lyric Opera, which is one of the best opera companies in the country, saying, “How would you like to open our season with Fanciulla del West?” And I thought, “I’ve seen it, but I don’t know it.” I write back and said, “I think I’m very interested.