Michael Kantor: I’ve always been very good at describing this, which is the intensity of the risk on Broadway. Help us, help someone who’s never worked on Broadway, understand what it states.
Harold Prince: Well… It’s the biggest magnifying glass the theater has in our country, and to some extent the rest of the world. I mean, everybody in London knows what we’re doing on Broadway. It’s a trade-off. The risk is greater, certainly, than doing a show in a regional theater in the Midwest, or even in the Far West. If it works well, the word will filter back, but not as intensely as if it works on Broadway And if it doesn’t do well, there’ll be no word at all. If you fall on your face in New York, it’s an international incident. And of course, if you fall in your face in New york, it’s the old Irving Berlin story. The next day after the bad reviews, you walk along the street looking at your feet at the cobblestones or the sidewalk because you know that everybody’s looking accusatorily at you as if you were a mass murderer or something. And I’ve experienced that. Every time something is ill-received. So the stakes are enormous. They’re also enormous. Shows cost a great deal to do on Broadway. A giant investment factor. The rewards are greater because it is a window for the rest of the world, because it makes it possible for you. Jumpstart a career and really get there. Now you’ve got to stay there. And that’s one of the beauties of Broadway is that you really are as good as the last few things you did, and then they write you off and forget. They’re very quick to write you. If you’ve been around a long time, as I have, I’ve been written off periodically, like the rest of the guys, but the rewards are greater. No question about that. You get to do your work and then get to ask to do it again in England and Tokyo. And Vienna, and Hamburg, and Amsterdam, and on and on because the world is getting much smaller. And there’s a much more intense interest in what we do throughout the world. I mean, I’ve worked in Tokyo. Twice in the last number of years. Directed shows from scratch. In Buenos Aires, doing Kiss the Spider Woman, wonderfully appropriate place to do that show, and so on. There was no such interest when I started in the theater. Maybe you got to London, that’s about it.
Michael Kantor: When you were young, you know, very young, growing up, what was the first time you heard the word Broadway, or what did it mean to you?
Harold Prince: Well it meant everything to me and the first time I heard it was a very young kid because middle-class Jewish families went to theater on Saturday afternoon to a matinee. You went with your mother and very often with your father and your mother. The very first play I remember seeing was Julius Caesar’s Mercury Theater production — I’m not Julius Caesar, sorry about that, you scratched that — the very first play I remembered seeing was Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater Production of Julius Caesar which was modern dress, it was done, the brown shirts and Mussolini outfits and pretty clear metaphor for the times, it’s before World War II. And I’ll never forget it, it’s indelible. But you know the way kids remember things, they become indelable. I’ve forgotten so much from last year, but I haven’t forgotten that. And similarly, I haven’t forgotten seeing a very young Robert Morley play Oscar Wilde on Broadway. Flora Robes in a great English dame in a show called Ladies in Retirement. And I’m just picking them out of the air. I saw LeGalien and Schildkraut in Uncle Harry. I don’t know what years they were. They probably cover 10 years, all these shows. And then when I was old enough. Know just how mighty the experience was. I saw Loretta Taylor in the glass menagerie sitting on the top balcony. I knew from the get-go, that’s to say eight years of age. My permanent escape from reality would be the theater.
Michael Kantor: You’ve been very candid about this but help us to understand how an experience you had at 14 also helped shape you.
Harold Prince: I think you’ll find it is not uncommon to people who make a life in the theater that they have solitary, somewhat solitary childhoods, escapist childhoods where they play with a stage and toy actors, where they take refuge in a world that’s out there of which they’re no part. I did that. By the time I reached 14, what you’re referring to is I had a nervous breakdown at the age of about 14, 14 and a half, which my parents put down to puberty, and they told me everybody had that at that age. I went to school the next day and said to my friend, Benny, are you having this? He looked at me like I was crazy, which clearly a part of me was, but it was important. It’s never threatened me since, but what it did do, I felt like I went into a tunnel, spent a terrible four to six months. So uncertain, insecure, so scared of everything, and silent. When I came out the other end, I was another person. And I had much more drive and much more direction than the kid who went into it. I came up with purpose. Fortitude, I once asked someone what that was, a professional, who said that’s called a nervous breakdown and you cured yourself. So I guess wonderful things can happen under those circumstances. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, and I haven’t forgotten it, but neither have I forgotten seeing Orson Welles in Julius Caesar.
Michael Kantor: You then brought some of that fortitude to the office of the reigning king of Broadway, for lack of a better word, Mr. George Abbott. Describe the man.
Harold Prince: Well, I worked for him for three weeks before I knew him. I was hired by someone in his office because I’d sent a script around. And I got a note back saying this script isn’t any good, but your letter, accompanying it, is. And precisely what the letter said was, I don’t know what you would pay this recently college-graduated fella that would be in any way useful. I can’t even imagine what 25 bucks would be. Would require of me. So I’ll work for nothing if you let me work around there. And if you can tell that you’re not paying me by the quality of what I do, then for God’s sakes fire me.” Well, the letter just kind of intrigued the guy. I have since gotten that letter because I’ve told this story before and I’ve gotten that letter now every few years and undoubtedly if you run it, I’ll get it again.
Michael Kantor: Okay, let me just jump back a little bit. So many shows on the town, Fiorello Company, are set in New York City. What special qualities does New York, even Broadway itself, have that make it the right place for me?
Harold Prince: High energy, naivete. Boy, and. Sense of promise, the future. It’s the Big Apple. It is the most vibrant. Promising city on the face of the earth and guess what i think it is now perhaps more so because it’s less dangerous i love new york Other cities, I spent a great deal of time in Europe. We have a house there. I love travel, and I love Europe. But the patina, the sense of that kind of… Over hundreds of years that is part of every other city on the globe. Is not part of New York. Boris Aaronson once said when we were doing Follies, which was a show about tearing down a theater, he loved the metaphor, a Broadway theater. And he said, you know what this is about for me? This is about an American epidemic, which is all Americans are picketing their age. He’s right, and they still do. We hate getting older. We hate the lines and the dark rings and the balding heads and all the rest of it. And that’s an American disease. It is not similar anywhere else in the face of the earth that I’ve been.
Michael Kantor: Here’s a broad but important question for us. What do you think the musicals that we’ve loved over the years say about us as a country?
Harold Prince: Well, they say we’re naive. They say we are optimistic. They say were a bit sentimental. They say that American popular music is the best popular music on the globe, that it’s endemic to this century and some. I think in the last 40 years. Home the craft so, develop the craft that our storytelling facility has enlarged enormously. That doesn’t mean the stories we tell have gotten more humanity, it doesn’t mean that they’re maybe literarily more important, but it does mean we know how to shape stage musical better than they used to. And with all developments, you lose… You lose a certain… Open naivete as the craft gets better and better, but you can’t stop that. You know, it’s the old thing of people saying, why don’t they write musicals the way they Silly, damn, unimportant, trivial books with all these popular songs. Well, first of all, those are not popular song styles today. And second of all if anyone wrote a musical book, the equivalent of some of the revivals that cause people to say that, wish for that. That show would close in two nights. You know, there’s, we’ve put too much into the pot now. We can’t go back and say it’s just a silly story with some stringing together some happy songs. That’s not a contemporary musical.
Michael Kantor: Your comment reminded me of something in a really incisive way that you looked at the 20’s and 30’s shows as moving in a certain way, like down in one. Fill us in on what those shows in the 20s and 30s must have been.
Harold Prince: Well, it was a technology. I actually didn’t get to work on Broadway till the late 40s as a stage manager. They still were that way. They still with that way, what you did was you told the story in depth and then a traveler that’s a curtain would close or a drop would come in shallow, make the stage quite shallow. And then people would cross the stage while they change the scenery, often rather noisily upstage. And these people who went across the stage talking would say things of no importance to the story because you wouldn’t be listening with the intensity that you need to. So I remember Abbott working on a musical called A New Girl in Town that I was one of the producers of in 1955 and the travelers drops were still in, the technique was still there and he turned two of the girls in the chorus and said. Give her a basket with some vegetables in it and give her a baby She can carry it kind of papoose style and I want you to go across the stage and you Mara I want to turn and I wanted to say well We’re thinking of moving into a new neighborhood and then when you get to the wings Hopefully the scenery will be changed and we’ll raise the the traveler or the curtain Uh, I remember because the show wasn’t awfully good. So I remember turning to my partner and saying I’m so much more interested in this lady and why they’re moving into a new neighborhood and when and the circumstances in her life than I am what’s gonna be happening upstage of her on the full stage set. It was a mean-spirited kids comment, but that’s what you did. You also very often closed a curtain and nothing happened. The orchestra conductor played what you call utility music. The hits, and they played, and then he’d get a signal saying the scenery’s in place, he’d stop, and the curtain would open, and the show would continue. All of these conventions, we were used to, until, until in my mind, South Pacific. And I went to the opening night of South Pacific in 1949, and on that night, there were two. Travelers, one going each direction, all the way across the stage, it was possible to continue the story in front of one, between two, and upstage of the second one. So you had three levels of activity, very much what in film you call dissolves. Josh Logan did that and the actors continued the story, right on the same point they were in when they the last full-stage set. And the show just continued seamlessly from beginning to end. The morning after that opening, Abbott called me into his office and said, what’d you think of last night? And I said at a time when it was, not such a cliche, awesome. And he said, it was epic. And there was a lot to learn. What did you learn? And he took me through what I’ve just described. What’s fascinating about that is that the theater didn’t pick up those techniques from that moment on, but went right back to the old conventions. The original production of My Fair Lady, which was a number of years later, had utility music and drops and shallow scenes. One of the shallow scenes introduced a great song on the street where you live, so it had great text, but still the technique survived. For a number of years after South Pacific.
Michael Kantor: You also, at one point, spoke of the movement, the dancing.
Harold Prince: Well, you see, because of those drops, everything moved from right to left or left to right. People made their entrances and went that way. Everybody went that all the time. And the dancers went that. There was another thing which people have forgotten. If you danced, you rarely sang. If you sang, you didn’t dance. If you were a star, you sang and danced less well than all the people who sang and danced in the ensemble. You put all these people together so you had a star personality who sort of sang. There were exceptions, big ones, Mary Martin, Merman, a lot of them. But there were a lot who weren’t exceptional. And they did that. Then you got the chorus dancer. So the book was constructed so that the chorus singers came out, supported the star, perhaps sang their own big hymn, and then left the stage, and out came the dancers from the wings. They did their work, and then they went off. And that’s the way the show was structured. By the time Rodgers and Hammerstein made their impact and even more by the time of West Side Story, when everyone had to act, sing, and dance, those days were over. And now, in order to get a job in a Broadway musical, you have to do all of those things expertly. The other thing that you remind me is, with the technology, with full stage following full stage, without the necessity to close curtains and bring in drops, we learned how to turn things, how to move them right in front of you, how to show you the stage mechanics artfully, then we were able to move from all the way upstage all the downstage. Dance made it possible for guys like me who can’t choreograph. To see movement coming towards the audience, coming diagonally from upstage all the way down or diagonally, from downstage, all the up. All that kind of movement, which was intrinsically dance movement, is now used in directing every musical. And you rarely do this thing. I rarely do that.
Michael Kantor: Who brought that, who brought that to bear? Who do you see as the key, you know, sort of revolutionary in terms of, would you say Agnes DeMille maybe?
Harold Prince: Well, Agnes certainly is a large part of it. Agnes and Jerry Robbins. Having just done Showboat, well, four years ago or five years ago, the material in Showboat was an enormous push to the techniques we’re talking about. Naturally, I didn’t see the original production. I can’t imagine how they told that using old-fashioned stage machinery. They clearly did, but it was a big invitation to do it the way we can do it now, and We did. But things like the miscegenation scene and opening the boat, Joseph Urban did the original set for the inside of the cotton blossom. We got ready to do the new version. Eugene Lee, who’s a great designer and with whom I’ve worked on Sweeney Todd and lots of shows, said, I can’t improve on Joseph Urban. I hope you’ll take a paraphrase of it.
Michael Kantor: Let me dive into the initial Showboat question. Putting yourself back in the 1927 mindset, how did Showboat redefine that?
Harold Prince: Well, it was seismic. I mean, to borrow from Frank’s review of the last production, Frank Rich, forgive me, Frank Rich’s review, but it was seismic then, that’s for sure, the earth shook, because basically there was this incredible centerpiece of a scene in the first act, the miscegenation scene, which had about eight leading characters. Inter-relating, no songs, and incredibly complex political plot about miscegenation. You have to remember that Showboat premiered in 1927 when the musicals were all the way identified them before, trivial, light-hearted, just spinning pop songs together. Suddenly along comes a show with issues and politics and and serious stories, a bunch of serious stories. But it’s 1927. So along with all this watershed stuff they were creating, they also hung on to very old fashioned conventions. So the show is a curious mix of old fashioned musical comedy and modern musicals. When you undertake to do it. It was a very good idea for them, by the way, to do that way in 27, or they would have been totally rejected. But when you rethink it, years later, 60 years later. Suddenly. The old-fashioned stuff gives you a lot of trouble, but you can’t get rid of all of it because the show depends on some of it. Because some of the songs, Life Upon the Wicked Stage, are perennials. You cut it out, people will immediately say, where is it? And some of storytelling, guys arriving on the scene gratuitously with guns that go off and scare people and so on, all of those mechanics would be unacceptable in a musical you are creating now, but they’re part of that particular show, so my task as a director was making that marriage work between those materials. It’s what I was saying before, there, there is quite impossible to create an old-fashioned musical today, I think. I suppose nothing’s impossible, but I wouldn’t know how you’d do it.
Michael Kantor: What about, you mentioned just off camera, the raising money. Describe when you first started as a producer in the 50s, what it was like to ask people for money, and then at the very end, let us know what it is.
Harold Prince: For certain people, it’s hell asking people for money. I’m one of them. I hate asking people money. Even for charities, I hate to ask them. The sums of money you raised to do a show. In 1954, when I did my first show as a producer, we needed $250,000. We only spent $169,000, for $168,000 you can’t get anything today. But that kind of money, if you were, I was one of three partners, I’m easily the youngest, We went around and raised $1,000, $500. A lot of people. 400 people at $500 took care of most of our budget. Turns out we did better than that. So we had 175 investors. The show turned out to be an enormous success. And so for the next many years, all I did was send a letter out saying the next show will be about baseball, the next will be kids fighting, street fighting in New York. And the money came in because We made such an enormous return for our investors out of the first and then the second and then third and so on. But you could see the costs escalating and you could by the time I did Follies, that was 1971 and that was the most expensive musical ever done. 550 elaborate costumes, incredible scene changes, huge cast. It cost $800,000 to do. You can’t get much for $800000 today. And when that happened, the $800,000 I could still somehow or other get by not begging, borrowing or stealing. But that was the end for me. I could see that was over. I would not know where to come by $10 million to put on a big musical today, or $5 million to put a less big musical. I wouldn’t know how to start.
Michael Kantor: What’s the problem now?
Harold Prince: Well, the source of that kind of capital today is usually a big business, a corporation, enormous fat cats with millions to make or lose. But people with millions don’t want to lose. They want to make. And to deal with an art form, as you would a business, is… Ill-advised, and from my point of view, reprehensible. You’re stuck with people trying to figure out what makes a hit. Good luck. So you get demographics, you get audience questionnaires, you get poll takers, and you get a glut of expertise, which isn’t expert at all. If you look back on the history of successful. Both artistically and commercially successful, Broadway theater. Preponderance of art there. Thank God.
Michael Kantor: Terrific, what did you think of On the Town?
Harold Prince: Saw on the town. Was it with 43, 44? 44. I was at the University of Pennsylvania in my freshman year, so it was 44, and it opened. I saw it at theater that subsequently became the George Abbott Theater, but wasn’t in those days. I was so overwhelmed by the marriage. That kind of orchestral sound, serious music, dance, comedy, the buoyancy, the innocence of the book. Very profound texture of the music Bernstein wrote and Robin staged that I then saw it nine times in the first two weeks of its run. So I guess I thought a lot of it.
Michael Kantor: Let’s go back to George Abbott. What do you think were the most important things?
Harold Prince: I learned discipline. I learned respect for the craft. No nonsense, show up on time, do your job well, don’t indulge yourself. Don’t suffer fools, not for one minute. Don’t indulge histrionics. Apply to it many of the same rigid criteria that you would any job you do. Have fun. He was a man who had, he was a very bright man and a very educated man, had a great deal of information in here. He didn’t. Chastis, he didn’t like crises, he didn’t liked contention, he didn’t likes battles, he wanted to work in an atmosphere that was enjoyable. I saw that and clearly it’s an enormous lesson to learn early in your life. I don’t feed off controversy. Some directors do, no question. That’s what makes them know it’s coming. I can’t bear it. You ought to be able to bring that out of yourself and your colleagues. I learned that from Abbott. I did not learn his specific taste, but I did learn a curious word when you apply it. The material for which he became so famous. He was the world’s most famous director of farces, the American farce. The door slamming, the hotel rooms, the people running back and forth. You know, 20th century, boy meets girl, three men on a horse. But you know, he never slammed a door for the effect. He slammed a doors because the character had to get out of that room or get into that room quickly. And the laughs came because of that character and the situation in which he found himself. Not because of the trickery of door slamming. And I saw over the years very quickly while he was still alive, people try to emulate those effects for the wrong reason. It’s really like an actor trying to get a laugh. You don’t try to get laugh. You deal with the moment and the character. And if the laugh’s there, it’ll come.
Michael Kantor: He seemed to have nurtured so many important people in the Broadway musical theater. Give me a sense of, well, number one, Mr. Abbott. What was that about, and who were the people that he, in his career?
Harold Prince: First, you should know why he was able to, because it’s a wonderful reason. He was able to nurture promote so many careers more than anyone else in the history of theater for two reasons. One is he lived longer than anybody else in theater and was active for over 75 years. The other more important reason is he was so secure. The theater is a breeding ground for jealousy. How’s he doing? How am I doing? How are we doing? How are you doing? Who’s getting ahead? All that nonsense.
Michael Kantor: I’m sure it feels like another life, but take us back to opening night.
Harold Prince: Oh, Lord, it does feel like another life. It’s such an uncharacteristic show for me to be associated with in subsequent years. But I do remember the night very well because you talk about Mickey and Judy doing a show, my partner and I, Bobby Griffith. The third partner was a fellow named Freddy Bresson, but he was a Hollywood guy, and he made movies, and he was older than I, probably older than Bobby, I’m not sure. Different, different kind of fella. So we were these two ex-stage managers, but there’s the point, we weren’t ex. We stage managed Pajama Game as well as producing it, which presents a very peculiar quandary for the actors in the show. They love you dearly, they want the show to work, but you’re the boss, aren’t you, or are you? You know, it was like that. And on opening night, we wore dinner clothes and we carried flashlights in our back pocket And the curtain went up. To this day, there have never been as many showstoppers as there were on the opening night of that show. One after the other, Adler and Ross had written just this extraordinary hit score. And even more importantly, one of the songs, Hey There, was a hit, number one in the country before the show opened. That doesn’t happen anymore. So all this was happening, and each number stopped the show cold. And the show took an extra 10 minutes on opening night. And we were talking over these little biscuits, stage manager’s biscuits, to each other. It’s going well, I think. I think it’s going, well, don’t count your whole, you know, one of those things. And anyway, at the end of the show, the audience gave it a standing ovation, which was not common in those days, and just screamed to the rafters. And then the curtain finally came down, and the two of us walked across this empty stage. The work light came down and just looked at each other, and we knew. Our lives would never be the same. And then Abbott appeared, and the three of us stood there, and it was incredible, just incredible. You’re just as nervous about the second time around, but this is only one first time around.
Michael Kantor: Tell me about Bob Fosse at that time.
Harold Prince: Bob was married to a wonderful dancer named Joan McCracken, who was an Agnes DeMille dancer. She was the original girl who fell down in the original production of Oklahoma that Agnes choreographed. She said to George Abbott, my husband is a great choreographer, potential. He choreographs his own material in the movie of Kiss Me Kate, in which he danced with Carol Haney. Who became the dancing star of Pajama Game. She said, I really would highly recommend him. What George was crazy about. And took her word and said, let’s use them. Well, we couldn’t get anybody else to take the job, but I, being extremely cautious, because I don’t think you get more than one chance. Maybe you don’t, or maybe that was my worst fear. I said… Do you think we could talk Jerry Robbins into standing in the wings in case we get into trouble? And he said, you ask him. So I asked Jerry, and Jerry said, I wanna direct musicals. I’ll do it if I can have co-directing credit. Now this is, he didn’t direct one moment of that show, and it seemed an offensive demand to me. But I went to habit. And without one second’s pause, he said, oh, give it to him, Hal, it’ll make you feel better. Give it to them. Everybody will know who directed the show. And so for then on and forever, it read, directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins. The rehearsal period took place. Bobby did a giant job. Jerry came in for one day, perhaps, and made a few little suggestions about tidging up things. There was a number called I’m Not at All in Love, and he suggested putting a cart in it on the factory floor, which was a good idea. And I hounded him about the bow for the show, because I didn’t like the one that we had, and everyone was busy, and he did that. But he was a safeguard. He was there, but Bobby did it. And then obviously Bobby went right on to do a staggering job on Damn Yankees and so on. And Bobby wanted to be a director. It’s the old joke, isn’t it? What I really wanna do is direct.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about Damn Yankees quickly. How did that project, how did the year the Yankeez lost the pennant?
Harold Prince: Well, Bobby and I had brought Abbott seven and a half cents, which became Pajama Game. Abbott was brought book in galleys called The Year the Yankees Lost the Penitent by a fellow named Al Taylor, who was an agent at William Morris. He said, I’ll do it, but my boys have to produce it. And Al Taylor. Sub-producing credit in order to have it done. And it’s not a show I would have ever picked. It’s interesting, you know, I did help pick Pajama Game because at heart it was about a labor unrest in a pajama factory. That contains two things that are connected somewhat with my career. One is a very strange venue for a musical, a factory with machinery and so on. Curiously beautiful. And factories have reappeared in my life as a director. And then labor unrest. And that’s very close to my heart, a political subject. That it was done so frivolously and lightheartedly is a different matter. I could not have done that. However, the book was lighthearted. And what’s fascinating about it is when we went to raise the $250,000, After the first audition, when I didn’t raise a plug nickel because we mentioned a strike in a pajama factory, I then from then on, where I raised all the money, would say, this is about Romeo and Juliet in a pajamas factory in Iowa. And I never mentioned the strike again.
Michael Kantor: Great. Thank you. What about Gwen Verdon and Damien Yankees and the role of Lola and her presence?
Harold Prince: She was, you know, Gwen had had enormous, got an enormous reaction dancing in Can Can as the lead dancer. They hadn’t seen her act much, and they didn’t know whether she could or not. Damn Yankees was happening, and there were a couple of candidates before Gwen. Zizi Jomair, she turned us down. One other person, who’s the young girl who played the lead in the movie of South Pacific?
Speaker 3 It’s a game.
Harold Prince: Say it again. Mitzi Gaynor. Mitzy Gaynor! Then I mentioned Gwen, and we found out she was working in Paris as assistant choreographer to Jack Cole on a movie, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, I think it was. It was a follow-up to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And we asked her to come to New York, and she did. I remember her walking into the office, never forget it, just dazzling, whole lot of red hair teased way up. What a glamorous figure, and she wore, she’ll not remember this, but I do, she wore a dress that just looked sensational and that I remember saying to the designers, copy that dress for her entrance dress in the show, and they did a version of it. Anyway, we had the meeting, it was great, she went away and turned us down. I don’t really remember how we persuaded a reconsider, but we did. But first she turned us down.
Michael Kantor: Didn’t her role grow as over-rehearsed? I think it was.
Harold Prince: I think it was a pretty swell role. No, she is not uncommon in musicals for a performer not to appear for the first 30 minutes of the show and then come in and you’re so glad they’re there and just take the whole show with them. That was true in her case. It was certainly true in Carol Haney’s. The Phantom doesn’t appear for quite a long time, 30 minutes probably. I don’t think there are rules about such things, but I do not believe that part grew except perhaps with dance extensions to accommodate her stunning talents.
Michael Kantor: South Pacific opening night we talked about before. Do you remember connecting with Steve Sondheim?
Harold Prince: I do. He doesn’t. I remember we met in the aisle that
Michael Kantor: Help me just…
Harold Prince: Well, on the opening night of South Pacific, I went, I was taken by Mary Rogers and her parents, and he obviously went with the Hammerstein’s. And I remember meeting him in the aisle. Thinks that never happened. I like my memory of it. It’s better.
Michael Kantor: West Side Story, do you think of it as a landmark musical?
Harold Prince: I don’t think the authors do, but I do. Well, for one thing, it was the first time that the singers and actors did their own dancing. Demanding dancing. For another thing, the techniques, the scenic techniques, the continuation of what happened in South Pacific, but even far more subtly. The wipes and the full stage dissolves and close-ups and all that stuff. And then what I was describing about dance coming towards you. Those surely, a lot of it, owed a debt to Agnes in Oklahoma and Carousel. But now the same people did everything. The willingness of the audience to accept tragic material was very new to the theater. Ironically, it had happened first in Showboat in 1927, but despite Showboat’s great success, it didn’t recur again until Carousel, almost 20 years later, and then West Side Story. I think what was happening was we were redefining what musicals could be. Because we were drawing further and further away from what was popular music. It wasn’t dictated, popular music wasn’t dictated by what was on the stage. It was now coming from other places. The musical theater could re-examine its potential subject matter, and we started to move into an area that had been exclusively the property of operas and opera libretti, serious stuff. The walls started to come down, thank God, and now it’s much harder to define what is an opera and what is a serious musical. And much of the material. Is that popular in musical theater could have been opera, i.e. Sweeney Todd.
Michael Kantor: Didn’t people initially walk out on what that story is?
Harold Prince: Oh sure. People walked out on West Side Story in droves. Steve, who wants to remember that sort of thing, tells me that it went on forever for the entire run at the Winter Garden. I don’t want to remember, that sort of things, so I don’t know who’s telling the truth here, but I know they were in drovs. But then we had walkouts in Boston, Cabaret, every night. And by the thing, one of the beauties of an audience walking out is They have an unerring for spotting authors or producers or directors. And so when they leave, they edge their way over and tell each other in louder than normal voices how much they hate what they just saw and are leaving. And you’re sitting right there, patsy, listening to it. Happens all the time.
Michael Kantor: Claire Bernstein, I guess, at one point said, you know, that everyone was united. There was not even a whisper of a happy.
Harold Prince: West Side Story? Of course no whisper of a happy ending. How could you do that?
Michael Kantor: Well, just, you know, given the time and the…
Harold Prince: Oh, no, I think, you know, total unity. The only thing that there was ever any disagreement about was Officer Krupke because, and I think it’s greatly to their credit, the authors kept saying, this doesn’t belong in here. And the producers kept saying we need it in the second act. We’ve got to give the audience a lift, a relief. Otherwise, the second will be too relentless and we’ll lose. Too much of an audience. I don’t know whether we prevailed or reason prevailed, but that’s why that number stayed there, no doubt.
Michael Kantor: What was the critical reaction and how in particular did Arthur learn?
Harold Prince: How you know this, I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what, on the opening night of West Side Story, it was clearly a great big hit. But the reviews. Wanted to warn the audience that it was cold, that it cerebral, that they weren’t gonna feel it internally. Obviously I disagree, but that was what the critics said. So when the reviews came out, there was cavelling, and cavelling was very disappointing to everyone. It’s worth mentioning to you parenthetically that Steve Sondheim was not mentioned in the main review in New York. As lyricists for that show. Arthur did a series, we had the Today show over, they came in with camera crew to do the party. Very dangerous notion. And I think it was Garroway or somebody like that, or wasn’t Garrow, yeah, maybe it was Garaway. But came in and the camera wandered around as the reviews were read, and Arthur Lawrence said disparagingly, he said, well, some of the crickets Don’t like the show and he liked that a lot and everybody laughed and then the man working the camera said I didn’t get that or I need new film or whatever so they ran it again and he said the thing about the crickets and the guy didn’t get that again so it was an outtake and it was an outtake it was now take but Arthur stuck with it and crickets made its way to the Today show and I have a I have print of that
Michael Kantor: How did Jerry Robbins work on that show to create
Harold Prince: Jerry Robbins divided the cast, as it was divided in the libretto between the Jets and the Sharks, but he divided them that way off stage. He told them to pack together, to move in packs, to eat their lunches together, to take their breaks together and not to talk to the other. It built up a painful resentment between the two. They took it very seriously. And for the length of rehearsals and probably a good deal of the Broadway run, it was like two companies that shunned each other. For young kids who were starting it was probably a very good lesson. The theater was covered in newspaper articles about gang wars in New York. They related to it. There was one character in that show, anybody’s, who wanted to be a jet, but they wouldn’t take her, little girl. Lee Theodore played the part, subsequently a terrific choreographer. Neither the jets nor the sharks would talk to her. Have lunch with her. Take a break with her and she went through the entire exercise in New York, on the road and then again in New york, solitary figure shunned by both groups.
Michael Kantor: Why do you think music needs to be played?
Harold Prince: Because it was a popular show that got better reviews than West Side Story. And because historically, nothing unusual about that. You look back and see what shows won the Tonys for Best Musical and which epic landmark shows didn’t. You’d be quite surprised. One of the ones I hate mentioning it because I did work on it, I’m very proud of what I did, was Follies, but it didn’t win. There’ve been others. It’s like asking me why so-and-so didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature and why so and so, whom I’ve never heard of, is a Nobel Laureate.
Michael Kantor: What do you think you learned from Jerry Robinson? What’s his legacy?
Harold Prince: Me or everybody? Oh, I think the marriage of dance movement and storytelling. And I personally learned that spatial relationship. He used with his dancers. I used it all over again when I did Sweeney Todd. They’re not dancing, they’re moving in a pack. They’re moving a pack that might have danced if we’d chosen to.
Michael Kantor: What was the key to that show?
Harold Prince: It’s the best, funniest book in the whole world, and then a great score, incredibly funny, and brilliant lyrics. It’s great material. That’s the key to the show. It’s worth pointing out that there are shows scattered throughout anyone’s career that are New York shows. Funny thing was one of them. We sent a road company out with a bunch of very visible bananas from television and and film and they did it didn’t do all that well and the movie didn’t. Do all that well and then when they brought it back to Broadway and revival it did wonderfully well. It’s a Broadway show. There are certain shows that just Company is a Broadway show. We had a relatively successful touring company, but not epic, and it’s a Broadway Show.
Michael Kantor: The other one on the roof was Jerry Robinson’s last original show, or show I got to see a few years ago. Why do you think he quit then?
Harold Prince: Well, I don’t know, it would be conjecture. A lot of directors quit. An earlier age than they needed to, I think because of wear and tear. There’s a lot of wear in tear. I think as a preeminent choreographer, he turned out, who knows how many, countless hundreds of ballets since that time. The stakes weren’t as high, it just, there’s less pressure. I think that’s probably one. Most of my peers over the years suffer more than I do. Brickbats, bad reviews. My wife said to me, and I live by it, you must. Know the difference between success and failure, which is an artistic thing, and hit and flop. Failures cause me a great deal of pain. Flops don’t necessarily.
Michael Kantor: In terms of its time. Did it feel particularly relevant to the 60s in terms of the kids questioning authority, leaving home, or was that really not one of the…
Harold Prince: Well, the issue of tradition is central. I mean, that’s really… Its unique message. And certainly… There’s been a diminution of respect for tradition, you know, of family, but I think it’s turning. I think there’s a profound need to circle back and deal with that, and certainly everywhere I look there are young families behaving the way families should, better than earlier families.
Michael Kantor: I was just thinking, do you think of Fiddler as sort of, I think of it in a way as an end of an era of a traditional book musical. And in a away, it’s close to an end of an area for you serving as a producer.
Harold Prince: Well, the years are interesting if you consider that. Preceded by a year-and-a-half cabaret. For me, cabaret was a groundbreaking way to look at structuring a musical in a different way. That’s almost a cliché now. You know, the MC came out on stage and dealt with that, and then we had Ben Varine, and then we had. One after another of these shows with an emcee in the central character. We also had the splintered thing, numbers, the act, shows like that, that reflected the emotions of the characters in the story, but were outside it, as I say. But all of that was pretty new with Cabaret, and Cabaret was a very different animal from… Uh… Fiddler on the roof your points well taken never occurred to me
Michael Kantor: It feels like the other part of that biorhythm cycle, or whatever you call it, was that the culture was changing, You were changing the form, but the culture of Americans at that point in the 60s was tearing itself apart.
Harold Prince: Well, I suppose, but also, see, one of the things which is hard to calculate is how much did good television, how much of an incursion did good television storytelling make on what we put on the stage? A lot. And redefining what a musical could be was a pretty good idea, because the more we provide something that television can’t come near. Movies won’t come near. The more we have an art form we can protect and nourish and grow with. That’s probably, around that time, is probably when television really asserted itself and got first rate.
Michael Kantor: Let’s dive into cabaret. Describe the first day of rehearsal. What did you show the cat?
Harold Prince: I took a leaf from the Jerry Robbins book on West Side Story and I came in with lots of newspaper articles and pictures and stuff. My abiding theme in that show and directing it was We had a lot of problems in Little Rock. We had lot of integration problems. It was very stormy in our country when I started to work on that show, and I brought in a photograph from Life Magazine, a two-page spread of a bunch of blond, Aryan, Nazi boys sitting, snarling at the camera, some wearing religious icons, and all stripped to the waist. And I said, who are these people and where is this? And no one guessed. And of course, it was Little Rock. And it was them snarlling at some poor little black girl getting on a bus to, or getting off a bus to come to school. So I use that to support the contention that wherever human beings are, terrible things potentially can happen. There was Lottie Lenya, sitting there, the first day of rehearsal. Fulcrum of the casting. So we were able to pitch ourselves right into it, the same way the West Side Story kids pitched themselves into Jerry’s exercise. Lotte Lenu was Kurt Weill’s widow, in her own right a great star, and probably as much a singing symbol of Weimar Germany at the time that Hitler came into power, which was 33. She and Kurt Weille escaped and came to America and Viles music became very popular and and after his death Lenya appeared in a small and extraordinarily effective production of the Three Penny Opera, which was his ticket to stardom in the 20s. And so she became a household name. Well, putting her in a Broadway musical about the rise of Nazism and having her sing, for me the key song, which was a song in which, as a landlady in Berlin, She sang an apology for not doing anything when the Nazis came to power and the song was called What Would You Do? What Would you do if you were me? Or I, which is it. The point is, it was right on the money. And What Would U Do was almost every musical has a song, Which is central, as in, as tradition is. To Fiddler, that moment was it. And I thought what it did so adroitly was the audience, the audience asked themselves that question, and if they were honest with themselves, quite a number of people in that audience would have done nothing either and be shame-faced because of it. Somebody clean up our eye, will you?
Michael Kantor: Just take it out of there. How did you make, you know, describe the importance of the role of the MC, you touched on it earlier, and what helped to shape Joel Gray’s character?
Harold Prince: The Joel Gray character, there’s a new version of Cabaret, which I’ve not seen. My version of cabaret turned on the notion that Joel Gray’s character of the emcee was the entertainer. I really took him from the Osborne play, which affected me enormously. A good, pathetic, back-to-the-wall loser. And along comes something that gives him back his spine. It’s the wrong thing. In this case, it turns him into Nazi Germany. He was a metaphor for the country. The country suffered the worst depression of any country on the face of the earth in 1929. Of course, it was a direct result of losing the First World War. Lamentably, Adolf Hitler gave them back their spine by turning them into Nazis. And you saw… Entertainer turn into Nazi Germany. That trajectory is absolutely necessary for me. I understand they don’t use it in this version. And fine, it doesn’t seem to bother an audience. But it would be necessary for.
Michael Kantor: What about his look? Didn’t that also contribute to…
Harold Prince: Well, we sat in an apartment, Ruth Mitchell, my assistant, who lived near the theater where we were rehearsing. So we all went up there with a makeup person and decided what Joel should do. And he just trying things on and off and putting them on. But you have to know. I was in the Army in 1949 and 50, summer of 51. I was sent to Germany in Stuttgart, where I was stationed, outside of Stuttgarten. I went to a little nightclub called Maxims, which was in a cellar of a bombed out church. And there, three… Very softy blonde women in butterfly costumes would cavort. Very diminutive MC, much older than Joel, but with lipstick on his mouth and eyelashes and rouge to hide clearly how really old he was. Took charge of the entertainment for the evening, and I inhabited Maxime’s. It seemed so appropriately tawdry after World War II.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about Boris Aaronson, we only have 25 feet, let’s just get, how is it a new kind of musical and what did it influence?
Harold Prince: The shape of it was completely different, thanks to the way the numbers reflected the story. There were two musicals on stage. One took place in real rooms and one in limbo. And in limba were these numbers, which indirectly commented on the serious, the real book upstage. Understand that the trajectory of the title song, Cabaret, was as follows. A girl comes out to sing an idle frippery about herself and her old roommate. And then she walks downstage into an area that she’s never been in before, namely the limbo area that we used to comment on the story. And she proceeds to get rather overwrought. And she sings Cabaret as you best know it. At the end of that song she goes and gets an abortion. What she’s found out at the beginning of the song is that she’s pregnant. What she decides at the end of the songs is that doesn’t want to have the baby or go on with the romance that caused the baby. Powerful material for a Broadway musical comedy. Subsequently, I’m not sure that cabaret the song is used that way in other versions, but that’s what we used it for.
Michael Kantor: How did he help create a unique kind of space for this show, and what’s his legacy to the
Harold Prince: Nobody’s ever been greater at design than Boris Aaronson. He brought with him everything he’d learned in Russia from Mayor Hold, from Alexandra next year. From all the great visual artists who worked there. He honored the black box, the empty space. He taught me to honor it. Now, I didn’t always have to work in it. The black box did not prevail in Fiddler on the Roof, but it did in Cabaret, and it did subsequently in Follies. He always found organically. What the metaphor, again that word, for a show was. If it’s company, it’s about steel. It’s about linear. Almost Mondrian configurations. New York is about elevators, so he surprised me and put an elevator in it. Cabaret. Tawdry colors against black backdrops. That would describe George Gross’s drawings pretty eloquently and so much of the Feininger and so many of the German expressionist stuff. He was infinitely interesting, unbelievably impatient, not just with you, but with himself. And so we would spend six months talking about everything before he put one line to He was more, it seemed to me, interested in the senses which are not visual. We would talk about smell and taste and sound. And somehow, miraculously, those other senses made their way into his visual designs. The most stimulating man I ever, ever worked with. I loved collaborating with him.
Michael Kantor: And the visual for you often is the key to a show.
Harold Prince: Well, yeah, because a director’s job is to motorize the storytelling. How do you tell the story? If you take something like a little night music, which isn’t a black box at all, but beautiful Swedish landscapes and panels with beautiful trees on them, white birch trees that go by, he designed that. How much music I need to move from one scene to another, how much the composer has to write to support it. What is the general movement of that show? Does it erupt? Does it move smoothly? You know when they say to you your show moves like silk off a spool, which they used to say to directors and certainly to me, sometimes that’s not remotely what you want, is silk off of a spool. You want something jagged and unpredictable. Turbulent, upsetting. Sometimes you want silk off a spool, as in a little night music. Boris, by the way, as long as you’ve asked about him, was one of the most articulate persons I ever knew. Incredible. He once, story of my wife being, he had a copy of Time Magazine, he threw it on the table and he said, you don’t need to read this. You know what’s wrong with it? Too much information. He knew exactly what the impact of that quirky personality was.
Michael Kantor: What do you think was important about care?
Harold Prince: I think it was bubbly, it was terrific. I had a fine time in the theater and I don’t think it changed much. But it was hair and I’m very grateful for it. There’s a temptation to, I remember, for years now they don’t say it anymore. They always talked about holography, how it’s going to make its way into the next musical generation. Well, it isn’t. Spoke for its time. I don’t believe it influenced. Me, anyway.
Michael Kantor: What was the impulse heading toward company to create a musical that told the story in a sort of fragmentary plot?
Harold Prince: Well, we were playing, it was a period in our lives where we played with non-linear storytelling. Obviously, I had preceded it with Cabaret, which was both linear and non-linear. Now we made our way right into a whole non- linear evening, and we followed it up a year later with Follies. So then you get to read in the newspapers that the musicals have taken an incredible turn, and the musical of the future will be non- linear. Nonsense. Then you go right back and do Sweeney Todd with a hell of a story. There is no point in predicting the future of musicals. Sung through, not sung through, but it’s it’s nonsense. It’s for other people to do not people who to make musicals.
Michael Kantor: Somehow, didn’t company cement the idea that you could do a show without a straight story on?
Harold Prince: Well, it certainly proved we had. How many have followed? How many of we followed? A lot of things you can prove, but how innovative actually are they?
Michael Kantor: What does company have to do with the 60s and your own…
Harold Prince: Well, it was the end of the 60s. It was the 70s, really. Well, I just was terribly proud. I mean, my personal life, my career. My personal life’s married, I had children. It was, it examined marriage, marriages in New York, it examined people who don’t wanna get married. More importantly, it examine the willingness to commit yourself to another human being, marriage or not. That it certainly examined, and that’s certainly a central issue in our society then. Since that date Think of all the people who live together and aren’t married. So it has changed, big time. But the musicals tend to reflect things. Follies reflected something in my head. I think every musical does. I mean, when I did Showboat, that’s the most obvious reflection. It’s still running, so it’s worth pointing out. But, you know, as a man with two kids, getting ready to get married. So they went and got married. And then they went had children. So I now have their grandchildren. I mean I have my grandchildren, they have children, two of them. Showboat is a family, it’s a hymn to the family unit, and indomitable, and not just… A family, a family of theater people, and the largest, most important sense, a family a man. So the show probably wouldn’t have triggered the response it did for me 20 years ago. I probably would not have directed it 20 years.
Michael Kantor: How is Follies a sort of recapitulation of the history of the Broadway musical, and sort of an homage?
Harold Prince: Ben Stone was a character, was, for my money, the leading character in the show. John McMartin played him. He was a politician, very, very successful, very charismatic, the last man in the world who you’d think. Problems with the soul. Marriage, beautiful wife, all those things. But he was a victim of taking care of only one segment of his life, his career. Anyone who works in the theater runs that risk. That show spoke to that, and I thought it was important to to it. Speak to me for it to pay. More attention should be paid. To that other part of your life.
Michael Kantor: Why were you willing to co-direct?
Harold Prince: Same reason George was willing to, Michael said I don’t want to do the choreography. I knew how much material there was there. It was just incredible amounts of material. Enough for two directors, but he said I didn’t want to choreograph anymore, Hal. I want to direct. So I remembered vividly what had happened in 1954 and I said so, go direct. And he did. And it certainly gave him the jump start he wanted. We worked independently of each other. Except for the end of the day when I’d show him what I did, and he’d show me what he did, and we’d merge them. But there was enough work for two people. Really, so much work to do. So it was a very good decision.
Michael Kantor: Back to Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse. You had an interesting comment that I heard somewhere, which is that when choreographers, there’s a cult of choreographer directors, which you’re not a part of, and you were able to distinguish sort of what they turned to.
Harold Prince: Well, I remember when I said it. I’m stuck with it, but I guess I think it’s somewhat true. When you get into trouble, if you’re a choreographer, you turn to your feet. If you’re not a choreographer, you’ve got to turn to something else, your head, I guess, and all the information you’ve put in there over the years. That touches on something that, but I’m not speaking of these two choreographers remotely, but I do think that over the years, there’s less respect for what appears to be irrelevant information, education. Even, believe it or not, the history of the art form in which you work. Not a lot of people, they know who Strindberg is. They come out of, but they don’t know who the practitioners of Strindburg were, who the great actors were, what the great productions were, what the sets looked like, and so on. Well, now, broaden that to a place where theater doesn’t count at all, which is simply history, philosophy, all that stuff. There isn’t a as much currency in all of that today. And that’s because things move faster. People are unwilling to put so much time into the investment. They want to get there quicker. And maybe they don’t respect all that information so much.
Michael Kantor: What’s it about the story of Sweeney? What was the sort of metaphor for Sweeny?
Harold Prince: Well, I imposed a metaphor on it, because I… Dragged kicking and screaming into Sweeney. It was Steve’s idea. And until I could impose the industrial age on it, a lot of people have said, but it’s not mentioned anywhere. It’s mentioned visually in the course of the show. I needed to know that all these people. Imploding all of these people chopping up humans and turning them into meat pies, eating Were a result of a soullessness brought on by the industrial age. By taking people off the farms and sticking them in the factories. By making them work 16 hours a day and breathe filthy, soot-filled air and so on. That is not what Sweeney set out originally to do. I believe… My version. More substance and it made it possible for this guy to direct it. That’s all. I was the director of choice. So I’d never been able to just do it for the sheer telling that story.
Michael Kantor: Why is that show so close to your heart? I should save that for after my…
Harold Prince: Well, I think it’s even closer to Steve Sondheim’s heart than mine, but it’s very close. It was a daring, courageous thing we did, and we had fun doing it and we were extremely proud of it, and it was a success. It was flop, but a success, and the opportunity to show that much courage on Broadway. At these prices, I think that’s lost. I don’t think you can say I’m going to do the story of Commodore Perry’s incursion on Japan with all men. All Japanese men, some of them playing women. So that there’s not a recognizable actor on the stage and the story is as remote from your everyday experience as any and I’ve left out the best part and I’m going to tell it in a sort of. Hybrid Kabuki style as viewed by an American, authors and directors. Maybe that’s not courage, maybe that’s foolish. But whatever it is, we did it, and we stuck with it. And John Weidman, whom I see all the time, and Steve and I are just as proud as we could be of it.
Michael Kantor: Andrew Lloyd Webber seems to have brought back sort of spectacle in a way that, you know, it used to be, you know, let’s talk about Phantom. It’s seen as the spectacle musical. From the days of Black Crook, people have loved
Harold Prince: Well, I don’t think I know. I can swear to you, I was there. Phantom of the Opera was not designed to be a spectacle. It was designed to serve the story it tells. I mean, I did a show before that, Evita, with Andrew. No one accused it of being a spectacle, gonna tell the story of Phantom of The Opera, go look at the silent film with Lon Chaney, Go look at Claude Rains in the color film. It’s a spectacular story. It is about an opera house in rehearsal, it is about self-indulgent, histrionic human beings at their work, it’s about crystal chandeliers and gold-embossed tables and desks. Insofar as we did it as adroitly as we did in a black box, I seem equipped to know that it’s a very simple show with some holes in the floor that reveal candles, a little bit of smoke. Wouldn’t you give anything to get rid of smoke in the theater for the next 20 years? And choice props. But its effect may be spectacular. But I promise you, it isn’t spectacularly big.
Michael Kantor: Why is it so popular? Why has Weber got this magnet?
Harold Prince: Well, that show, I can only answer for that show. I can’t answer for the show on roller skates, and, you know, there are other shows. It’s escapist. It’s the ultimate escapismusical. More people have said to me, I went in, I sat down, and I became a child again. I hadn’t been in touch with that child in 40 years. Good for us. That’s what we hoped would happen. You get lost. Nothing that accompanies you to the theater. Was sitting next to you in the theater during the two hours you’re there. That’s rare, that’s rare in the theater.
Michael Kantor: Didn’t he approach you with cats and you had some story about you thought it was a metaphor?
Harold Prince: I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand what they were about. It’s just, it’s funny, I listened to it all and I said, Andrew, is this something I don’t get? Is this about Queen Victoria? She’s the main cat, and Disraeli, and Gladstone, or other cats, and then there are, you know, poor cats, am I missing this? And he took a terrible, painful long pause and said, Hal, it’ about cats. And we never discussed it again.
Michael Kantor: What about creating a show from a Vita, let’s say, from an album, from a pre-existing score that’s not a show?
Harold Prince: No, it was a lot of lyrics and a slippery piece of paper that was slid inside the jacket cover of the album. But the story was told, the numbers were in some direct linear connection. Where there wasn’t a connection, I asked them to write another song, which was The Art of the Possible. And I excised things. And then I sat at my desk and dictated… Those lyrics into scene form. So that I describe where they took place, what it would look like, what would happen during that sequence that they sang this. Scene two, scene three, scene four, up to the end.
Michael Kantor: Your underlying drive had to do with media manipulation and the president.
Harold Prince: The whole show for me was about something, again, that was preeminent in my mind, and that is Microphones. Moving cameras, still cameras, flash bulbs. And I was asking myself at the time I did that show, talk about a good question. Who’s the man that really lives in the White House? Thanks to the preponderance of media manipulation. I found myself in the mid-70s, wondering whether I had any idea who the man is who lives in the White House. It’s an odd thing to be discussing right now. Everything was controlled. And every picture, every utterance. Pre-arranged. And Evita came along and I thought there are the star exponents of that kind of, they were the inventors perhaps of contemporary media manipulation. And I wanted to show them from the public’s point of view, which took cameras, projections, film, and then wanted to take that away and show them alone in their bedroom. It was a nice exercise, the audience understood it right away.
Michael Kantor: Deep Sondheim. The first show you did together was at West Side Store in Moscow.
Harold Prince: Yes, we were good friends. I mean, whether we met or didn’t meet at the opening of South Pacific, we were friends soon thereafter. And we used to, I’ve read it, I said it, it’s true, we sat in Walgreens drug store and ate bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwiches and talked about the theater and what we’d like to do in it. And so by the time I got involved with West Side Story, I knew every note of the music because he played it for me in my… And we’ve stayed close ever since. We had a 10-year, nonstop 10 years where we worked together. And then because of Merrily, we roll along. Broke away. A lot of years have gone by, but I have a feeling we’re in a mood to go back and work together again. We certainly have made the pass at it very recently, and there were time incursions. His obligations to one show, my obligations to another, but, you know, it’d be nice. I think we’re ready to. He’s amazing. Why don’t we face it? He does both. He writes the greatest lyrics. He writes magnificent music for which, all the years of his early career, it was very common for people to say, why don’t you tell your friend to stop writing music? Criminal, criminal thing to say because his music is as superior as his lyrics and there’s nobody better and he’s very much a voice for this period we’re in, these decades.
Michael Kantor: You were both mentored by people from the traditional musical comedy theater, and yet you both moved the musical into a different…
Harold Prince: Well, you started this interview with this. What you get from your mentors is likely to be solid grounding and respect for the craft you’re going to work in. And most important of all, encouragement to seek your own voice and to use it as they did their own voices. So when you get a guy like George Abbott to say you’re a director, it’s a hell a lot more important. Most of the other people in the theater who wouldn’t tell you that. It’s the, it’s again that word jump start. It’s a jump start you need is approval from the right source. And as you know, the Sondheim story is, Oscar said, I don’t like that show you wrote when he was in, either in college or in high school. It’s terrible, but you’re not. That’s what you need.
Michael Kantor: How would you say, just in your work in terms of company and following, you complement?
Harold Prince: I’m sure I speak for him too. I think that process continues now. I’m working with a young composer in his middle twenties on Parade and he writes his own lyrics as well as music. It feels very familiar to me.
