Towering theatrical figure won 21 Tonys
NEW YORK — Harold Prince, a Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musical theatre with such groundbreaking shows as The Phantom of the Opera, Cabaret, Company and Sweeney Todd and won 21 Tonys, has died. He was 91.
Prince died on Wednesday after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland, his publicist, Rick Miramontez, said.
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 to 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 said it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to musical theatre. “All of modern musical theatre owes practically everything to him,” Lloyd Webber said.
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 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.
In addition to Lloyd Webber, Prince, known by friends as Hal, worked with some of the bestknown composers and lyricists in musical theatre, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and, most notably, Stephen Sondheim.
“I don’t do a lot of analyzing of why I do something,” Prince once told the Associated Press. “It’s all instinct.” Only rarely, he said, did he take on an idea just for the money, and they “probably were bad ideas in the first place. Theatre is not about that. It is about creating something. The fact that some of my shows have done so well is sheer luck.”
During his more than 50-year career, Prince received a record 21 Tony Awards, including two special Tonys — one in 1972, when Fiddler on the Roof became Broadway’s longest-running musical then, and another in 1974 for a revival of Candide.
He earned a reputation as a detail-heavy director. Barbara Cook, in her memoir Then & Now, wrote: “I admire him greatly, but he also did not always make things easy, for one basic reason — he wants to direct every detail of your performance down to the way you crook your pinky finger.”
A musical about Prince, called Prince of Broadway, opened in Japan in 2015, featuring songs from many of the shows that made him famous. It landed on Broadway in 2017.
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 the innovative, revue-like musical that followed the travails of Bobby, a perpetual New York bachelor.
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).
Prince’s work with Sondheim stopped in 1981 after the shortlived Merrily We Roll Along. It wasn’t to resume until 2003, when they collaborated on Bounce, a musical about the adventureseeking Mizner brothers that had a troubled birth and finally made it to Broadway as Road Show.
Prince was mentored by two of the theatre’s most experienced professionals, director George Abbott and producer Robert E. Griffith.
In his autobiography, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre, published in 1974, Prince wrote: “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 matinées in the theatre with their children were a regular occurrence. A production of Julius Caesar starring Orson Welles when Prince was eight taught him there was something special about theatre. “I’ve had theatre ambitions all of my life,” he wrote in his memoir. After a stint in the U.S. 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 Griffith. Their first venture, The Pajama Game, starring John Raitt and Janis Paige, was a big hit, running 1,063 performances. They followed in 1955 with another musical smash, Damn Yankees.
In 1957, Prince did West Side Story. Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins and with a score by Bernstein and Sondheim, it, too, was acclaimed.
Yet even its success was dwarfed by Fiddler on the Roof (1964), which Prince produced and Robbins directed and choreographed. Set in Czarist Russia, the Bock-Harnick musical starred Zero Mostel as the Jewish milkman forced to confront challenges to his way of life.
Prince tried never to rely on technology. “I believe the theatre should take advantage of the limitations of scenery and totally unlimited imagination of the person who is sitting in the audience,” he said in 2015.
Prince is survived by his wife of 56 years, Judy; his daughter, Daisy; his son, Charles; and his grandchildren, Phoebe, Lucy and Felix.