Director, producer ‘a real giant’ of Broadway
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. Prince was 91.
Prince’s publicist Rick Miramontez said Prince died Wednesday after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland. Broadway marquees will dim their lights in his honor Wednesday night.
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 19thcentury 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.”
Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone Wednesday, told the Associated Press that it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to the stage. “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. 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. Prince told him to bring it to him first. “That was game-changing for me. Without that, I often wonder where I would be,” Lloyd Webber said.
21 Tony Awards
Tributes also poured in from generations of Broadway figures, including “The Band’s Visit” composer David Yazbek, who called Prince “a real giant,” and the performer Bernadette Peters, who called it a “sad day.” “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander, who was directed by Prince in “Merrily We Roll Along,” said Prince “reshaped American theater and today’s giants stand on his shoulders.”
During his more than 50-year career, Prince received a record 21 Tony Awards, including two special Tonys — one in 1972 when “Fiddler” became Broadway’s longest running musical then, and another in 1974 for a revival of “Candide.” He also was a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor.
It was with Stephen Sondheim, who was the lyricist for “West Side Story,” that Prince developed his most enduring creative relationship. He produced “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), the first Broadway show for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics.
They cemented their partnership in 1970 with “Company.” Prince produced and directed this innovative, revue-like musical that followed the travails of Bobby, a perpetual New York bachelor ever searching for the right woman.
“Company” was followed in quick succession by “Follies” (1971), which Prince co-directed with Michael Bennett; “A Little Night Music” (1973); “Pacific Overtures” (1976); and “Sweeney Todd” (1979).
Their work together stopped in 1981 after the short-lived “Merrily We Roll Along,” which lasted only 16 performances. It wasn’t to resume until 2003 when Prince and Sondheim collaborated on “Bounce,” a musical about the adventure-seeking Mizner brothers that had a troubled birth and finally made it offBroadway as “Road Show.”
Special mentors
Prince was mentored by two of the theater’s most experienced professionals — director George Abbott and producer Robert E. Griffith.
“I’ve had a unique life in the theater, uniquely lucky,” Prince said in his midlife autobiography, “Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre,” which was published in 1974. “I went to work for George Abbott in 1948, and I was fired on Friday that year from a television job in his office. I was rehired the following Monday, and I’ve never been out of work since.”
Born in New York on Jan. 30, 1928, Prince was the son of affluent parents, for whom Saturday matinees in the theater with their children were a regular occurrence. A production of “Julius Caesar” starring Orson Welles when he was 8 taught him there was something special about theater. “I’ve had theater ambitions all of my life,” he said.
Prince is survived by his wife of 56 years, Judy; daughter, Daisy; son, Charles; and grandchildren, Phoebe, Lucy and Felix.