Harold Prince Interview (page: 2 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

You mentioned having a reputation for getting people their money back. We've read that you asked your first investors for very small amounts, $500 or $1,000 each.

Harold Prince: Oh yeah. We had dressers put up $500. We had 175 investors put up $250,000.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: They stayed with me, those 175 investors, for most of my producing career, when I was producing and directing my own shows, which is something Abbott had done. I directed and produced the shows, as in Cabaret. The point is that they didn't need us on Broadway. They had Rodgers and Hammerstein doing just fine, and Feuer and Martin doing just fine and Leland Hayward and the Theater Guild. They didn't need us. So when we decided to do the first show, we had to analyze what can we do that will impress people immediately that there are new boys in town and that we found a different way to invent the wheel. And we figured that the way to do that was to do a show as elegantly as it required, but cheaper in terms of cost than anybody was doing them, and get the money back to the investors as soon as possible.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

The day after Pajama Game opened, the investors opened their mail and found a check for 10 percent of their investment, along with a great review in the newspaper. It takes a lot of smugness, I guess, or chutzpah, to know what's going to happen at the box office, but we were pretty sure, and we did it. We did it again on the next show, and we just kept doing it for a while. Pajama Game cost around $69,000. Damn Yankees cost $162,000, and the investors got paid after 10 or 12 weeks. They were in the profits right away, so not only were they thrilled with the hits, they were thrilled with the return they were making on their money.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think it's very important in the commercial theater to return the investment. I know there are fewer and fewer people who agree with me, because the investor now is so wealthy in his own right that he's the producer. So you look at a Broadway show today, and you will see a whole lot of names over the title, and really who they are is the people who put up the money to put the show on. They can take a loss if it doesn't happen, and it's a shot at a Tony Award and all that sort of thing. They enjoy the theater, but it isn't the safeguard that I think... It doesn't restrain you, the way it did us, to have to make it a good investment. Let's see if I can make sense out of this. After a bunch of successes at the box office, it gave us the right to have failures that did something we divined was important for the musical theater form. In other words, you could say to the investor -- and I would do it in a letter -- "I am not certain you'll ever see this money again, but you've been doing just fine," and then we'd do Follies or Pacific Overtures. You'd do a show that you had to do for artistic reasons, that in fact, ultimately, in the case of both of those shows, are somewhat historical, but they never returned a plug nickel to anybody. But the investors didn't care, because they took pride in being part of the process.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

These days, it wouldn't be enough to raise $169,000. What would you need? 10 million?

Harold Prince: Ten million doesn't buy you much anymore. It seems to be going up. I heard about a show that just opened in London that cost 24 million or something. That 's a lot of scenery!

It's not about art then, is it?

Harold Prince: It can be. You can create something artistic. The problem is, because of the escalating cost, do you want to? Or are you caving in to the audience?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There is one definitive moment in the road. It is the moment when you as a producer, or even a director, decide that you are giving the audience what it wants rather than taking the audience on a journey you wanted to take. West Side Story is a perfect example of taking the audience somewhere. When it first opened, 100 people walked out on that show every night for a year. Lots of people didn't get it. It didn't win the Tony Awards or any of that stuff, but here it is, and it did pay off, and it made a film that they benefited from. The point is, I still believe you have to take your audience somewhere, and don't underestimate how damn smart they are and how willing to be stimulated. But the situation was parlous at the moment.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

It's a different world now, isn't it?

Harold Prince: Yeah, it's a different world, but it's not just the theater. It's the whole entertainment industry. All of this reality television, and the business of being copycats all the time, that was something you didn't want to do. You didn't want to copy anybody. You wanted to be the first to do something. I think Fiddler on the Roof is the other show that would never have happened today. A lot of it was written, and its producer couldn't raise the money and lost faith in the possibility that he ever would, and I grabbed it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My partner had died by then, and I was alone and fearful. I wasn't sure. You know, we'd had three partners, then two, then me. He died of a heart attack on the golf course. I had already done a couple of shows that succeeded after he died. So I had some credibility, and my office was on its feet again. Fiddler on the Roof, they asked me to direct, Bock and Harnick, and I said, "Though I'm Jewish, that's not my family background, so I don't know it. Mine is German. I don't understand shtetls." Sheldon Harnick gave me a book about shtetls, and I thought, 'I'd be fraudulent, I don't feel this." So I said, "Get Jerry Robbins," and he wasn't available, and I said, "Instead, I'll do your other musical," which was She Loves Me, which was a great start for me in terms of people knowing I knew what I was doing, and a musical I loved. Then they went back to Jerry, and Jerry said, "Get Hal Prince to produce it." So I said yes, and that seemed the perfect combination. Indeed, for Jerry, it was a hymn to his father. He did it for his father, and his initial dance teacher played the old rabbi in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Looking back, it sounds like a fairly unlikely subject for a Broadway musical, life in the shtetl.

Harold Prince: It is.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Jerry insisted and insisted and insisted on that opening number being larger, and engulfing a huge audience that wasn't Jewish, that didn't know about shtetls and so on. And over and over again, they'd talk about it, and then finally, one day somebody used the word "tradition," and he said, "That's it! Write about tradition. That, everybody has." So the show has been as great a success in Tokyo as it was on Broadway and anywhere there is tradition. Well, where isn't there tradition? Actually, unfortunately, there is less tradition today -- and that is a terrible loss culturally to all of us -- than there used to be, but that time, tradition was just international. Every country held on to that tradition, and the show succeeded because of it.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

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