At 75, impresario Harold Prince is working as hard as ever. But the musicalis an endangered species, he tells Derek Scally in Berlin.
Harold Prince can sum up in one word how he became the undisputed king of Broadway: pragmatism. He is the last of the great Broadway impresarios, a walking, talking history of the Great White Way: no surprise considering he has made most of that history himself in the last five decades. Harold Prince has influenced the evolution of the musical like no other person in history, transforming it from diversion to spectacle and forcing it to grow up along the way. But he is not given to bouts of nostalgia and his CV, a lexicon of Broadway's greatest hits, clearly shows how he moved with the times to stay on top. West Side Story, Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera are just a handful of the shows he brought to the stage as producer or director.
Now he is back in the spotlight after renewing the most fruitful collaboration of his career with the composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, to create a new musical, Bounce. Hours after the show's première in Chicago last week, Prince was on a plane to Berlin for a weekend musical workshop. The 75-year-old Prince shrugged off jet-lag to give an energetic performance that shows why he has lit up Broadway marquees for the past half-century.
"I love work. I am never as happy as I am in a rehearsal. I don't see any reason to stop, I haven't been told to go away yet and even if I am told to go away I probably won't," he tells me, glasses sitting in their trademark fashion high atop his forehead. However, Prince admits that now, more than any other time in its history, the musical is an endangered species. In the 30 years it took The Producers to travel from the cinema screen to the Broadway stage, the world of small-time producers and little old lady investors as depicted by Mel Brooks is no more. Musicals that once cost $250,000 can now easily cost $10 million, and they have an extremely high failure rate. It's a ruinous state of affairs, which is compounded by smaller audiences, fewer stars and a widening gulf between popular and theatre music.
"The musical is the operetta of the 21st century to more of an extent than I ever dreamed," says Prince. "If we don't watch out, \ can be Vienna."
Prince was born in 1928 in New York to a German-Jewish family and began his career at the age of 20 in the office of the legendary producer and director, George Abbott. In what was the first of many pragmatic decisions in his career, he put aside dreams of becoming a playwright and plunged into the chaotic world of stage-managing and casting musicals. Though he works in a fickle business, Prince has had an incredible strike rate, as over 20 Tony Awards prove. He enjoyed success right from the beginning, as co-producer of the Leonard Bernstein/ Stephen Sondheim musical, West Side Story. But it was Cabaret, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, that established him as a theatre director and opened up new perspectives which influence the musical to this day.
He developed the form further in the 1970s through his extraordinary collaboration with Sondheim. Together they transformed the musical from light entertainment into high art, but in 1981, after one flop too many, they went their separate ways. By that time, Prince had begun to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on shows that continued to break new ground while earning some money into the bargain. Nearly two decades on, The Phantom of the Opera is still a cash-cow on both sides of the Atlantic.
Prince has worked with the two giants of musical theatre and sees more similarities than differences between the intellectual Sondheim and the commercial Lloyd Webber. "Andrew and Stephen have a lot in common. They both have a great sense of theatre and are both damn talented. I know they both admire each other," he says.
Prince is confident the new Sondheims and Lloyd Webbers are out there and he has made it his business to find them and champion their cause. But even his considerable support cannot guarantee they can get a hearing, much less earn a living on the Broadway of today. The season just passed is typical, with new plays and musicals crowded out by revivals of classic musicals such as Gypsy or musical adaptations of films such as Hairspray.
"The temptation to say it was better then than now is always strong. But to say 'the good old days' is such a damn cliché," says Prince. "Nevertheless, things were much more helpful to developing new talent until very recently."
He welcomes adaptations and revivals, but says New York needs a non-profit house dedicated to revivals of the past to free up theatres for the original work that is Broadway's future. Original musicals these days are more likely to have a workshop and a run at a regional theatre before opening on Broadway, if they ever do. Prince was pragmatic enough to take that route with his new musical, Bounce, an innocent immorality tale that tells the story of real-life brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner. They were two charlatans in the great American tradition, who tumbled through life dabbling in everything from film-making to property speculation to the Gold Rush.
"We wanted to celebrate chicanery, the scallywag. Both guys won everything and lost everything, but on the way there they had a hell of a journey, deceiving other people, yes, but amusing everybody," says Prince. The story is told in a picaresque style with dozens of scene changes, from the Yukon to Hong Kong, and a Sondheim score that pays homage to the Great American Songbook.
"It's so melodic it's haunting me," says Prince. "The songs interrupt my sleep too much." With a broad "hybrid vaudeville" style and catchy tunes, Bounce couldn't be further removed from previous Sondheim/Prince collaborations, which were dismissed by many critics as too cerebral and cynical. According to Prince, Bounce works because the two men had such fun working together again.
"We never meant to have 22 years separating our work. It happened. Fate did it. At the beginning we had a day of circling each other, but then it clicked and we were like children again and the years fell away," he says.
The two men remained close friends in the years after their collaboration, but Prince admits that Bounce is their most autobiographical work to date.
"It's about two brothers' journey away from each other and back to each other. I was working on it for three years and never realised the similarity until my wife and daughter pointed it out," he says.
Prince and Sondheim have major changes planned before the show's expected arrival on Broadway next year, so they aren't too bothered by the mixed reviews so far.
"I asked Sondheim if he was disappointed. He said: 'Have we ever gotten better reviews?' "
After 50 years of proving that critical and commercial success in the theatre can go hand in hand, Prince continues to push ahead with new projects. Broadway's prince of pragmatism is far from tired and is still stimulated by the challenge.
"In the theatre I love the challenge of making people believe things they know aren't happening," he says.
