'A Conversation with Harold Prince'

A Conversation with Harold Prince Featuring Judy Kaye and Tom Wopat      

Friday, October 30, 2009  8 p.m.                                                                                 

Presented by Center for the Arts                                                                        Northeastern University, Blackman Theatre                                                                          Ell Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue                                                                                  Moderated by Del Lewis, Director of the Center for the Arts

He speaks as freely and easily of his failures as he does of his successes, with no discernible tinge of hubris - just the facts. And the fact is that Harold Prince is the recipient of 21 Tony Awards, the most given any individual, including the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award. In an extraordinary theatrical career spanning the decades from 1948, there have been only two seasons during which Prince has not been represented on Broadway. His successes far outnumber his failures and include the behemoth The Phantom of the Opera, still running strong in its 22^nd year, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Evita, and Fiddler on the Roof.

In anticipation of A Conversation with Harold Prince presented by the Center for the Arts at Northeastern University on Friday, October 30 at 8 p.m., BroadwayWorld spoke with Mr. Prince via telephone from his office in New York. When I informed him that his long-time friend and collaborator Stephen Sondheim had participated in a similar forum last year, Prince was unaware of it and said he is coming because he was invited. "I'm rather thrilled to know that Judy Kaye and Tom Wopat are working, that's really nice." Kaye won the 1988 Tony Award for Featured Actress in the role of Carlotta in Phantom, and will appear in Prince's new musical Paradise Found.

Although he has not worked with the Tony-nominated Wopat before, he is effusive in his praise for him. "He is an absolutely astonishing actor and a marvelous performer. I saw his musical last year (A Catered Affair) and I didn't even recognize him. He's just a really, really protean performer. He's brilliant and I'd love to work with him." Prince continues, "He's very special, I'd like to work with him a lot. He's very much my kind of actor so it's just circumstance it hasn't happened." When asked to define the phrase "my kind of actor," Prince says dryly, "A good one."  

The format for the event at N.U. allows the guest to liberally recount his years in the theatre, framed by questions from Moderator Del Lewis, Director of the Center for the Arts, and punctuated by song selections from many of his shows by the two featured vocalists. The content is sure to be rich with anecdotes about Prince's involvement with more than 50 musicals, plays, and operas, as well as his ascension from stage manager to producer to director while working for the Broadway legend George Abbott.

"I'm his discovery and he told me I could direct after I'd worked for him for awhile. He said, 'You're a director,' and that imprimatur is very important. The other thing in keeping with that was he taught me about truth. No matter what you do, even if it's a farce, you must be true to the characters and the circumstances of the story. It can be farcical, but it must be true. You never see a door slam that is not part of the plot." Prince had the opportunity to produce The Pajama Game in 1954 with Abbott directing, and took the helm as producer and director in 1963 for She Loves Me. He does not look back at the amazingly long list of productions to his credit. "You don't, and you don't even absorb it and you just go on. I think the reason the list is so long is that I don't think about the past at all." When I comment that he obviously truly loves what he does, he vigorously interjects, "You bet I do!"  

At the same time, he is realistic about the differences in producing now versus back in the day. "Those were the days. You could produce a show every year. All the great producers did a show a year. It was the economics. I did Damn Yankees (1955) for $162,000 - it would cost about 10 million today. That's too much. And I don't know where you go to raise 10 million; 162, that was easy. That's when you passed the hat." He reminisces about being 24 years old and asking people for money for a show, labeling it "a little Mickey and Judy," but says it's no fun when you're 81 years old.

The economics of the theatre business are responsible for the dearth of out-of-town tryouts, as well. "It was totally important my entire career and now what I'm doing is going all the way to London to recreate that experience. I've gone to London rather successfully to recreate that experience twice before with Evita and with Phantom, so what I lost in New York, I gained it in London. And I also gained it in Canada. I did Showboat and Kiss of the Spider Woman in Canada. The last successful show I did in New York was Sweeney. I have done limited engagement shows, like a wonderful one at the Manhattan Theatre Club two years ago called LoveMusik, but that was for ten weeks."

Chief among the many giants of the theatre who have been collaborators is Prince's great friend Sondheim. "He's just great, there's nobody like him and we've had a wonderful relationship. We've been friends forever. We were friends before we worked together. My wife's one of his best friends. I mention that because the friendships don't overlap." Fruits of the Prince-Sondheim labors include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd.  "We loved working together, then there was a time we'd done ten years of it and we both decided it was a good idea to go our separate ways and see how we'd survive and we both survived fine."  

The last show they did together in New York was Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 which ran for only sixteen performances. "That's a show that had a great score by Steve, but a flawed book. It was an idea that I really loved, but it was too complicated. Steve's music said very good, straightforward things about character, but the device of going back in time was just too complicated for an audience. And then they fiddled with what age should the people be. It was my idea they should be kids and they should graduate from school and then play from older all the way so you saw what became of them, or where they started to where they ended. And all of that was just too complex for an audience. On the other hand, Steve and I did wonderful work on it so that by the time it opened in New York, it was much more the victim of bad word of mouth long before we opened. That's, I think, what caused us to say maybe we shouldn't work together anymore. Expectations were so high that everybody was reviewing what we did before we were ready for them to even talk about it."

There should be some high expectations for Prince's new 2010 musical Paradise Found which he is co-directing with Susan Stroman and opening at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London for six weeks in June before moving to New York. "It's a really interesting story based on a book of Joseph Roth (Tale of the 1002^nd Night) who was a great writer. He was a Viennese writer who died in Paris in 1939 and he's now had a great resurgence. I proudly tell you I precede the resurgence since I've been working on the play for five years with Richard Nelson and Ellen Fitzhugh, the lyricist. And the extraordinary part of it is the music is Johann Strauss' adapted and rethought by Jonathan Tunick." The cast is replete with several of Prince's favorite stars, including Kaye, Mandy Patinkin, John Cullum, Shuler Hensley, and "an absolutely brilliant Emily Skinner. That would be a pretty strong cast, wouldn't you say?" he asks rhetorically.

Considering the vast amount of musical theatre history that he embodies, I wonder who might be a protégé of Harold Prince. "Gee, I don't know. I think that my colleagues are all almost the same age as me, and yet they all started working on shows that I produced. Like Kander & Ebb, Bock & Harnick, even Steve. But they're much closer in age to me, obviously. For real young protégés, I love the mentorship program and I have a young director working as my assistant right now and I think he's very talented, so maybe Dan Kutner is a name you'll hear soon."

I can't resist the opportunity to ask Prince a question about the role of the critic. He warns, "I'm gonna duck it," but goes on to opine that the critic is there to encourage people to see a piece of theatre. "More and more, audiences are not listening to critics. Alas, for some bad reasons, they're going to see terrible shows with big stars in them. That's really bad. But even so, a play like Wicked is a huge success, but the critics didn't care for it. Doesn't matter, audience does." In regard to the changing state of arts journalism coverage, Prince says, "I feel that it's sad that the major news magazines don't have regular critics, that there are fewer critical outlets than there used to be and that's bad." He also laments that Broadway is repeating itself too often and that there are too many revivals. "I don't want to repeat myself. That's where I get the energy, not repeating myself."

Rest assured that the new Hal Prince vehicle will not be a repeat and that he will continue to look ahead, not to the past. His list of achievements is amazing, but his longevity is for others to calculate. He strives to give the audience something they've never seen before, to excite them and himself. Still, he is a walking encyclopedia of the past 60 years of musical theatre and a wonderful raconteur of the libretto. With musical accompaniment by Kaye and Wopat, this Friday night conversation at Northeastern will be a masterful master class.

 

Mission Statement: The Center for the Arts, a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences, provides support for the arts as enrichment to Northeastern University and the surrounding communities in order to strengthen the education of Northeastern students, to develop audiences and artists for the future, and to cultivate the growth of the arts in urban culture. Through a series of professional arts programs, residencies, and public performances the Center provides opportunity and encourages students to become knowledgeable and active participants in the arts.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

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