Hal Prince, although recently deceased, still stands as one of the most influential and accomplished directors and producers in Broadway history. During his sixty years in the theatre world, he was awarded 21 Tonys and 10 Drama Desk Awards, and worked as an assistant stage manager, stage manager, producer, and director. Prince worked on over sixty productions including The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, She Loves Me, Cabaret, and Company.
Harold “Hal” Prince began his life in theatre at a very young age. As the son of an avid theatregoer, Prince was exposed to much theatre growing up, frequently attending performances with his mother and stepfather. The first production he attended was the Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar with Orson Welles. This exposure to theatre instilled a passion for the craft as well as a desire to become a playwright. He found playwriting to be the highest of the arts, but found he had a knack for directing while working with his college theatre troupe. Living in New York, Prince attended the Franklin School in Manhattan’s West Side and graduated at age 16. He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied theatre, history, literature, psychology, and philosophy - of which, his favorite subject was history. Prince was an active member of the Penn Players, where he wrote, acted, and directed plays. Prince graduated from University of Pennsylvania at the age of 19, and immediately began working for George Abbott. Producing, which occupied much of Prince’s career, he labeled a means to a career in directing.
George Abbott was a theatre producer and director who created a small experimental TV unit. At this station, Prince did many odd jobs, which included writing scripts for the shows produced, including the Hugh Martin Show. The show, set in Martin’s living room, was set to air on NBC-TV at 7:00pm on Sundays. After Abbott wrote and produced the first episode, he passed the role to Prince, who wrote and produced the second episode. The show ended quickly, as Prince and Martin had a lot of disagreements relating to the jokes Prince wrote for Martin, and Abbott was more inclined to keep Prince on payroll than to keep the show running. After the TV unit closed, Abbott recommended Prince to Robert E. Griffith as an Assistant Stage Manager on a number of productions at the Broadhurst Theatre. In this role, Prince ran the switchboard, helped with casting, and delivered messages. Griffith became a mentor to Prince, teaching him about both the technical and economic aspects of theatre. Sometime in 1949, Abbott recruited Prince to work as an Assistant Stage Manager for Tickets, Please, which opened 27 April 1950. During the run of this show, Prince began writing A Perfect Scream with Ted Luce - author of Tickets, Please. This show led to Prince’s induction into the Dramatists Guild. His next role, Assistant Stage Manager for Wonderful Town, introduced him to many important people he would work very closely with in the future; including Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. This production also began the production team of Griffith and Prince, one of the greatest production teams in Broadway history, according to Carol Ilson.
The first production that Griffith and Prince produced together was The Pajama Game. The book was adapted from Richard Bissell’s novel 7 ½ Cents, following the labor troubles in a pajama factory where workers demand a raise of 7 ½ cents. Griffith and Prince hired Abbott to direct, and convinced Bissell to come back to New York and contribute to the new book. Richard Adler and Jerry Ross wrote the lyrics, and as money was tight, Griffith and Prince worked as both the producing team and the stage managers. The show opened on 13 May 1954 at the St. James Theatre and became the eighth production to run over 1000 productions (on Broadway). It also won the Antoinette Perry (Tony) and Donaldson awards for Best Musical of the Season. As the youngest producer in Broadway history, the show earned Prince the label of Broadway “Wunderkind” at age 26, and set the stage for his choice of projects with controversial subjects and unknown actors. The Pajama Game was so well received that it was picked up and developed into a movie by Warner Brothers in 1957. Prince continued stage managing the show for six months, and then left to produce his next production with Griffiths, Damn Yankees, which followed a deal made with the devil in the world of baseball. The show opened 5 May 1955 at the 46th Street Theatre. At first, the show was not well received by critics, which led to many last minute changes in casting, musical numbers, and show order - all of which were presented by Prince. Then, when the tickets were not selling, Prince changed the cover photo to a picture of the main character scantily clad in a small baseball uniform, capitalizing on regained youth and sex. After all of these changes, Damn Yankees became a hit, running over 1000 performances and winning the Antoinette Perry award for best musical. This show was especially important to Prince’s development as a producer and director as it taught him to value his original philosophy of hiring relatively unknown actors like Gwen Verdon for lead roles instead of casting celebrities to bring in more ticket sales.
Harold Prince’s most notable work in the 1960s was Cabaret (1966). Cabaret followed Prince’s collaboration with Joe Masteroff, She Loves Me. Masteroff credits Prince entirely with the idea of Cabaret (Citation). Immediately after finishing work on She Loves Me, Prince suggested creating a musical out of John Van Druten’s play, I Am a Camera, although they ended up using the original Isherwood stories instead of the play. During the development of the musical, Prince acted as the producer. He hired Masteroff as the author of the book, John Kander and Fred Ebb as composers, Ronald Field as choreographer, and Boris Aronson as scenic designer. Throughout the process, Prince applied both expressionistic and conventional levels of realism by reflecting the production on modern culture. Contrary to popular belief, Prince was not influenced by Bertholt Brecht during his work on Cabaret. In fact, he was not a big fan of Brecht. Prince made it very clear that he did like a few of Brecht’s works, but wanted to be enveloped and engaged in theatre which was not one of Brecht’s ideals. He was inspired by the music of Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill, the methods of the Russian Taganka Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator. Prince visited the Tagnaka Theatre in the middle of Cabaret’s development, where he was struck by the symbolism, mechanization, de-emphasis of emotion, and constructivism.
During the 1960s, Broadway theatre was going through a rough time. There were increases in inflation, pop up porn shops near theatres in New York, and the war in Southeast Asia, which were all pulling from the theatre crowd. The inflation increased ticket prices, which dissuaded less fortunate consumers from attending theatre. Pop up porn shops sullied the reputation of Broadway theatre by associating it with dirty and taboo behavior. Talented actors were also moving to the West Coast to take part in the growing film and screen movement. The 1960’s was also the time period of the Beatles. In 1964, the band came to the US to spread their music, which took over the music industry. As for theatre, musicals were becoming less musical. According to Carol Ilson, the songs were less memorable, and the importance was put less on the creators of the music, and more on the directors and playwrights. The 1960s were extremely important in the US for the civil rights movement, which was a large source of inspiration for Prince’s Cabaret. Prince saw a parallel between the anti-Semitism in the proposed production and the march on Selma in the summer of 1965. This parallel was the driving force in Prince’s decision to take on Cabaret. In fact, one of the early drafts of Cabaret called for the presentation a film of the March on Selma and the Little Rock Riots at the musical’s end. This parallel interested Prince much more than the story itself. He found the original stories of Christopher Isherwood to be unexciting, especially that of Sally Bowles. Isherwood’s Sally had a job in a nightclub as a racy dancer and singer, which Prince found to be pointless as the main draw of the show. He felt that these traits would not lead to a developed or enticing plot. When asked by scenic designer Boris Aronson as to why he was making the musical, Prince answered “My main reason is to show that what happened then in Berlin could happen here now.” (Ilson).
Following Cabaret, Prince experienced multiple successes in West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and many other Broadway productions. Cabaret was just one of the many productions that created Prince’s legacy. He went on to win 21 Tony Awards for Best Direction, Best Producer, Best Musical, and Lifetime Achievement. He was also the Kennedy Center Honoree in 1994 and was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 2000.