Prince of stage
Broadway director and producer Hal Prince dies
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. He was in transit from Europe to New York. Broadway marquees dimmed their lights in his honor Wednesday night.
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 in his memoir. “I cannot go back so far that I don’t remember where I wanted to work.”
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, knifewielding 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.”
Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone Wednesday, said it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to the stage.
“All of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him.”
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.”
Tony winner Chuck Cooper told the Daily News that Prince gave “the American musical theater some of its brightest jewels. I doubt if there will ever be another theater artist who will create such a colossal and enduring legacy.”
Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Club, first met Prince in the 1970s and said he always encouraged her career.
“If you were in love with the theater, you were in love with Hal Prince,” she said.
In addition to Lloyd Webber, 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 50year 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 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.
“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.”
After a stint in the Army during the Korean War (he kept his dog-tags on his office desk), he returned to Broadway, serving as stage manager on Abbott’s 1953 production of “Wonderful Town,” starring Rosalind Russell.
The following year, he started producing with Robert E. Griffith.
In 1957, Prince did “West Side Story,” a modern-day version of “Romeo and Juliet.”
Prince is survived by his wife of 56 years, Judy; his daughter, Daisy; his son, Charles; and his grandchildren, Phoebe, Lucy, and Felix.