Harold "Hal" 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 will dim their lights in his honor Wednesday night.
Prince was theater royalty, responsible for some of the most popular and iconic shows in American history. He had more than 50 Broadway credits in all, including legendary and groundbreaking shows like "Evita," "Sweeney Todd," and "Company."
He won more Tony Awards than anyone: 21 in all. But he said one meant more than all the others:
"Maybe 'Cabaret,' because it was a very personal adventure," Prince said in a 2017 interview with "On Stage." "I had a lot of impact on the way the show was constructed and the way the show was delivered, and because it was my first real success as a director."
Born in Manhattan, Prince began working on Broadway in 1950 as an assistant stage manager for the show "Tickets, Please!"
Three years later, he went on to make his producing debut with the original Broadway production of "The Pajama Game." Other notable shows that he produced include "Damn Yankees," "West Side Story," and "Fiddler on the Roof."
Over the years, Prince was known for his work with two titans of the musical theater, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Prince directed and produced Sondheim's "Company," "A Little Night Music," "Follies," and more, as well as Lloyd Webber's "Evita" and "The Phantom of the Opera."
(FILE - This October 21, 1996 file photo shows Hal Prince, left, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, face reporters during a news conference in New York announcing Webber's new musical, "Whistle Down The Wind." Anders Krusberg, File/AP.)
NY1 asked him asked him about those collaborations in this interview two years ago:
DiLella: Tell me about your friendship with Andrew Lloyd Webber
Prince: It's very, very close and fine. He's a theater man. So we share a real hunger for theater and theatricality.
DiLella: What comes to your mind when you think of Stephen Sondheim?
Prince: Courage. Because he cottons two difficult ideas and he wants to explore them, and he's indefatigable about character, and he has a fertile imagination.
A retrospective of his work, appropriately named "The Prince of Broadway," ran at The Friedman Theatre in 2017 under his direction.
Prince worked until the end of his life, often checking in on "The Phantom of the Opera," which will celebrate 32 years on the Great White Way in January, just one of the many ways his legacy will endure.
Hal Prince is survived by his wife, Judy, his daughter, Daisy, and his son, Charles. He was 91 years old.
Tributes 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."
Composer Jason Robert Brown hailed Prince's "commitment and an enthusiasm and a work ethic and an endless well of creative passion." Actress Carolee Carmello said he "lit up a room like no one I've ever known and I always felt so lucky when I was in that room."
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 Sondheim.
During his more than 50-year 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.
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."
Prince was mentored by two of the theater's most experienced professionals — director George Abbott and producer Robert E. Griffith.
"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."
Born in New York on January 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."
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 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," featuring Gwen Verdon as the seductive Lola.
In 1957, Prince did "West Side Story," a modern-day version of "Romeo and Juliet" told against the backdrop of New York gang warfare. 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 had gotten his first opportunity to direct on Broadway in 1962. The musical was "A Family Affair," a little-remembered show about the travails of a Jewish wedding. Its Broadway run was short — only 65 performances — but "A Family Affair" gave Prince a chance to work with composer John Kander.
Four years later, Kander would provide the music for one of Prince's biggest successes, "Cabaret," based on Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories."
And it was "Cabaret" that established Prince as a director of first rank. With its use of a sleazy master of ceremonies (portrayed by Joel Grey), the musical juxtaposed its raunchy nightclub numbers with the stories of people living in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s.
"I became a producer because fate took me there, and I was delighted," Prince recalled in his book. "I used producing to become what I wanted to be, a director. (Ultimately, I hired myself, which is more than anyone else would do.)"
As he became more interested in directing, he withdrew from producing altogether.
Among his more notable achievements: "On the Twentieth Century" (1978) and two of Lloyd Webber's biggest hits, "Evita" (1979), starring Patti LuPone as the charismatic Argentinian, and "The Phantom of the Opera," in London (1986), New York (1988) and around the world.
"Phantom" is the longest-running musical on Broadway and hit producer Cameron Mackintosh noted that in a statement mourning Prince's death: "The Gods of the theater salute you, Hal."
Prince was a champion of imagination in the theater and tried never to rely on technology to give his shows pop, preferring canvas to LEDs.
"I believe the theater should take advantage of the limitations of scenery and totally unlimited imagination of the person who is sitting in the audience," he told the AP in 2015. "I like what the imagination does in the theater."
He explained that in one scene of "Phantom of the Opera" in London, candles come up at different times thanks to stage workers cranking ancient machinery, but on Broadway that function was automated.
"I would sit in the house and I'd see the candles come up. Something told me that was not as exciting as when the candles came up in London," he said. "So I said, 'Let's make this tiniest adjustment so they don't all come up at exactly the same time.' Now, no one knows that. No one could care less. But it meant something to me."
Prince worked for the expansive Canadian impresario Garth Drabinsky, overseeing productions of the Tony-winning "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1993), a lavish remounting of "Show Boat" (1994), and a short-lived revival of "Candide" (1997).
Yet there were creative misfires, too. Among his more notorious flops was the five-performance "A Doll's Life," a musical follow-up to Ibsen's "A Doll's House." It began where the play ends, when Nora walks out on her husband. And Prince directed the American production of Lloyd Webber's "Whistle Down the Wind" (1997), which didn't get past its Washington tryout, although the London production, with a different director, had a longer run.
Prince also worked as an opera director, with productions at the Metropolitan Opera House, the Chicago Lyric Opera, New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera and more. And he directed two films, "Something for Everyone" (1970) and a screen version of "A Little Night Music" (1977).
"To be both a genius and a gentleman is rare and extraordinary," said Thomas Schumacher, chairman of The Broadway League. "Hal Prince's genius was matched by his generosity of spirit, particularly with those building a career."
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Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.