Harold Prince Interview (page: 3 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

Let's go back to the beginning of your career. You have said that your parents took you to the theater a lot as a kid. Do you remember a time when you weren't interested in theater?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: I really was interested in theater from the get-go, and that's very lucky. I went to theater when I was eight years old. Every Saturday afternoon, we went to theater. That was a routine, and they really weren't particularly, aggressively highbrow eggheads, but they took me to some very odd stuff. The first show I ever saw was Orson Welles in the Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar as an eight-year-old. That's pretty strange stuff, and I've never forgotten it. You never forget the initial experiences you have. But then I saw all the great actors, and I saw plays, very few musicals. I caught up with a few musicals, but they always struck me as kind of silly, which is why, I suppose, so few of the musicals I've done have been appropriately silly.

Were your parents theater people?

Harold Prince: No, not at all. My father was on the Stock Exchange, down on Wall Street, and my mother was what they used to call a housewife. But, as a young person, she had known Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and she went to school with Dorothy Fields. She had been in an early Rodgers and Hart show. Not professional, it was their last show before they went professional. She sang and stuff. So she had that affection that people have for that sort of thing. So no one ever tried to talk me out of my calling.

Did you like to read as a kid?

Harold Prince: Yeah, a lot of reading with the flashlight under the covers, and a lot of play reading.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I caught on to plays as reading matter. I don't do that much anymore, but I think it must have been a hell of a good idea, because I knew all those plays, all the history of plays from even pre-turn-of-the-20th century, and I read them all and loved reading them, to the exclusion sometimes of great books. And then I got to know very early on -- I'm very lucky -- I got to know a lot of those playwrights, be in the same room with Robert Sherwood and his like. There were a lot of great playwrights around. Sidney Kingsley I knew very well, and Elmer Rice I met, a whole lot of people like that.

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Did you meet all of these people through your mother?

Harold Prince: No, not through my mom. I met them socially. A lot of people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The Rodgers family, Mary and Linda and Dick and Dorothy, they were very generous about young people being around. So you'd spend your Christmas Eve at their house, a lot of young people, Steve Sondheim included. And then I got a job very early. Very early. I got a job with George Abbott, who was one of the preeminent directors, producers, playwrights. He wrote melodramas. He wrote musicals. He directed the first Rodgers and Hart musical, Jumbo. He did all that stuff, and he had a hugely successful career that went for 75 years, and he took me on as a 20-year-old. I had written him, coming out of college.

I got out of college at the cusp of 20, right at the end of 19.

Did you study theater in college?

Harold Prince: No. There wasn't any. I did extracurricular theater at the University of Pennsylvania, and it's very possible I gave it more attention than I did the credit stuff. But I wrote a letter to George Abbott.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was terrified of how do you find a job. So I wrote him a letter to his office, and I said, "I don't know what I could ever do that would be worth any money at this point. I've had so little experience. So if you would take me on and make me useful, let me be useful. If you can tell that you are not paying me" -- that was the suggestion -- "by the nature of what I do, then please fire me right away." And the letter was so curious that I went there to work and stayed there, and then we shared an office, and then I became a producer. He was the director of the shows that I produced with my partner, and then I became a director, and we shared offices. He died at 107, oh 12, 13 years ago. I'm not certain. But I kept his name on the door until I moved offices. When I moved offices the whole thing seemed a little macabre. My wife said, "You know, I think you're really overdoing it. You're in your seventies. You can stop that now."

What plays really stood out for you that you read as a kid?

Harold Prince: Oh, a whole lot of stuff, like The Adding Machine. That is an Elmer Rice play, wonderful. Clifford Odets. I liked impressionistic plays. I loved O'Neill. Among the earliest plays I read was O'Neill's The Great God Brown, and it's a show I ended up directing on Broadway for the Phoenix Theater years later. It got well received. It's a hell of a complicated play in which people carry masks and confront each other behind masks, then put the masks down and you hear what they are really thinking. It is a device he used later on in Strange Interlude, when people spoke to each other and then spoke to what they were really thinking. What's interesting about that play, aside from the fact that I loved it, is that it was autobiographical, and if you then look at Long Day's Journey Into Night, it's a young man's covered version of telling that story, because he was a young man when he wrote it. I admired him enormously because he played games with theater, and he knew traditional Japanese theater and German theater and Russian theater, and he used all of those techniques. It is the kind of theater I like, and I gravitate to still.

Some of that stuff is so painful, some of the O'Neill works.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: Childhood is painful. Not everyone's, but I don't know too many people that are my colleagues who didn't have some painful childhood. Not necessarily imposed on you by your parents, certainly not deliberately. It's probably just something born in you, but I was very solitary, and I escaped into fantasies. This is, by the way, very common. I read Julie Harris at one point said she used to play with a stage and so on, and lots of playwrights have done that, and I did. I had a stage, and I performed things just for me on it. I would listen to the opera on Sundays, and Milton Cross would tell the opera story, and then the opera would start. "The great golden curtain at the Met..." the old Met on 37th Street, "...has gone up. Ladies and gentlemen, Rise (Stevens) is on," and then I would have set the stage and follow the -- but I didn't speak the language they were singing in. So of course, sometimes I was way behind them, and the great golden curtain would fall. And sometimes I would be finished with Act One, and they would still be singing.

So you were directing even back then.

Harold Prince: Oh, yeah. That's what I wanted to be. I would have loved to have been a playwright and a director, but I am too introspective for writing. It is very useful to have some facility for writing if you are a director. An articulate director is a good thing. It's hard to believe, but there are some very successful ones who are not articulate and who are reduced to saying, "No, that's not what I want. Try something else." I wouldn't be one of those guys. I do know how to sort of improvise a scene, and then the playwright will go away and bring it back much improved.

Did you ever do any acting?

Harold Prince: I can't. I'm terrified. When you direct large companies in musicals, you get everyone from Angela Lansbury, who knows it all, to somebody who is just starting and perhaps doesn't know anything and hasn't much training, doesn't know technique and so on, so you give them line readings, and you actually lay a performance on them, like a coat. That kind of acting, I'll do. It is very big and embarrassing, but they get the essence of where I am trying to take them.

And what about music? Did you study music?

Harold Prince: I can't read music, though I've directed a lot of operas. Everywhere, in Vienna, in Buenos Aires, in this country, all over the place. I knew John Dexter, the playwright, an Englishman, a very talented guy. He died too young. John and everybody else who was directing in Europe was doing operas as well, and I thought, "What is it about America that has cut that off?" It's changing now. Peter Gelb is beginning to ask theater directors to direct at the Met, but it is very rare. So I did an interview, and I was asked, 'What do you want to do?" and I said, "I want to try directing operas." I got a telegram in Europe from Carol Fox, who ran the Chicago Lyric Opera, which is one of the best opera companies in the country, saying, "How would you like to open our season with Fanciulla del West?" And I thought, "I've seen it, but I don't know it." I write back and said, "I think I'm very interested. I'll listen to it again," and I did open the season and it stayed in the repertoire. It's in the repertoire, and it's been done in San Francisco with Plácido. Carol Neblett did it often. That was the beginning. Then I did a lot of stuff.

Do you learn the music by ear?

Harold Prince: You learn the music by ear. I'm that awful thing, the director who walks in with a play script, when they are all working from the score. You see their eyebrows go up, and then suddenly, somebody will say, "Hey, you really do have some sense of music, don't you?" I've done a lot of Puccini, because he's a great theater man. When I would come to a scene and I wanted to take a pause, I wanted an actor to walk across the stage and open some drapes and look out at the countryside and breathe a sigh of sadness, so did Puccini, because it would always be in the music, and it gave me a hint I was on the right track.

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