Iconic Broadway director
NEW YORK — Harold Prince, a Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musical theater with such groundbreaking shows as “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Cabaret,” “Company” and “Sweeney Todd” and won a staggering 21 Tony Awards, has died. He was 91.
Mr. Prince’s publicist Rick Miramontez said Prince died Wednesday after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Mr. Prince was known for his fluid, cinematic director’s touch and was unpredictable and uncompromising in his choice of stage material. He often picked challenging, offbeat subjects to musicalize, such as a murderous, knife-wielding barber who baked his victims in pies or the 19th-century opening of Japan to the West.
Along the way, he helped create some of Broadway’s most enduring musical hits, first as a producer of such shows as “The Pajama Game,” “Damn Yankees,” “West Side Story,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He later became a director, overseeing such landmark musicals as “Cabaret,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone Wednesday, told The Associated Press that it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Mr. Prince to musical theater. “All of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him.”
Lloyd Webber recalled that, as a young man, he had written the music for the flop “Jeeves” and was feeling low. Mr. Prince wrote him a letter urging him not to be discouraged. The two men later met and Lloyd Webber said he was thinking of next doing a musical about Evita Peron. Mr. Prince told him to bring it to him first. “That was gamechanging for me. Without that, I often wonder where I would be,” Lloyd Webber said.
Tributes also poured in from generations of Broadway figures, including “The Band’s Visit” composer David Yazbek, who called Mr. Prince “a real giant,” and the performer Bernadette Peters, who called it a “sad day.” “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander, who was directed by Mr. Prince in “Merrily We Roll Along,” said Mr. Prince “reshaped American theater and today’s giants stand on his shoulders.” Composer Jason Robert Brown hailed Mr. Prince’s “commitment and an enthusiasm and a work ethic and an endless well of creative passion.”
In addition to Lloyd Webber, Mr. Prince, known by friends as Hal, worked with some of the best-known composers and lyricists in musical theater, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and, most notably, Stephen Sondheim.
During his more than 50-year career, Mr. Prince received a record 21 Tony Awards, including two special Tonys — one in 1972 when “Fiddler” became Broadway’s longestrunning musical then, and another in 1974 for a revival of “Candide.”