Harold Prince Interview (page: 5 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

How did you become a producer? You were very young when you produced The Pajama Game. How did that come about?

Harold Prince: Well, we (Bobby Griffith and I) were in the wings, stage-managing a show called Wonderful Town, which was a huge hit that Bernstein had written the music for. Comden and Green wrote the book and lyrics. Rosalind Russell, the big movie star, was the leading lady. I just got very impatient. I thought, "You've been away for two years, you're back, we really ought to do more with our lives." Bobby was 20-some-odd years older than I, and adored by everybody, but he wasn't going to do anything. And so, a little Iago-like, I whispered in his ear, "Let's move on." That appealed to him. My energy appealed to him.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There was a review in The New York Times of a book called 7 1/2 Cents, and he was working on something else at the time and could not -- he read the review and said, "Read the review, and if you like it, read the book, and if you like it, get the book." So I read the review, and I rushed and got the book, read it ever so quickly, found the agent, called the agent, went to see the agent, who was a fellow named Harold Matson, a very, very important and highly esteemed fellow. And he had offers from other people because of that review, one of them from Leland Hayward, who was a big-time producer who'd done South Pacific. But he bet on the two kids, or what George always called us, "the kids." There were a lot of years separating us, but he called us that. Roz Russell heard about it and said "My husband..." who is a movie guy, a nice man named Freddie Brisson -- "Will you take a partner?" and we said, "Sure. Raise the money. Where are we going to get the money?" In those days, 250,000 bucks; today, 12 million. So we did do that, and he did bring in some money, and we did the rest by doing backers' auditions. It turned into the biggest hit of the season instantly, which was a wonderful thing.

However, I stayed stage-managing. Bobby stopped. I stayed. We did a second show the next year called Damn Yankees, and I stage-managed that. I wanted the salary, which was something like $175 a week.

That's two classic musicals back-to back, and both of them Tony winners, too.

Harold Prince: Yeah. They are not remotely characteristic of my career as a director, not remotely, but I am a pragmatic fellow. When you work with George Abbott, it is a George Abbott musical.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When you work with Jerome Robbins, it's a Jerome Robbins musical, and then when you work for yourself, you take so much that you observed from other successful directors, but then there is one moment where you have to say, "This career isn't going to happen the way I want it to happen unless I express myself." I don't want to get lost. I have always heard that theory about, "Get lost in the material," that that's dearly to be desired, but I don't believe it for one minute. I think you want to be visible on that stage, and that happened. I did a wonderful show before Cabaret called She Loves Me, but it looked so smooth and tasteful and so on. Cabaret did something else: "Wait a minute. This is different. We have never seen this before."

In The Pajama Game, were you already working with Bob Fosse?

Harold Prince: Yeah. Bob Fosse was brought to George. He had been on film. He choreographed his own stuff on film with Carol Haney, who was in The Pajama Game and got a Tony Award. He was in the movie, Kiss Me Kate, as one of the dancers. He choreographed their section of one of the numbers, "From This Moment On." He was married to a dancer, Joan McCracken, who was very famous and was one of the original leading dancers in Oklahoma. She was an Agnes de Mille dancer, and she was married to Bobby, and she said, "My husband is a great choreographer." So Abbott said, "Why don't we take our chances?" Everybody practically was new on that show: the composers, Adler and Ross; the choreographer.

The only thing is, if you look at the billing, you will see it says "Directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins," and that was my doing. I wanted to ensure that that show was going to work. It is one thing if the songs are coming in and you can say, "I don't like that. Write another one," but when it gets to choreography, how do you know? Abbott said, "What do you want to do?" and I said, "I would love to ask Jerry if he would be willing to stand by." "Ask him." So I asked Robbins, and he said, "Only if I can have co-directing credit," and I said, "Oops," but I went back to the office and I said to George, "Mr. Abbott..." in those days, "No go. He wants co-directing credit," and without a pause, he said, "Give it to him." I said, "What are you saying? He is not going to direct. He may come in if we need him to fix a few dances," which is precisely what he did, not a great deal, very little. Abbott said, "What do we care? Everybody will know who directed the show." So that is how he got it, and it served to tell the world that Jerome Robbins wanted to be a director. That's how he told them.

So this gave you a security blanket?

Harold Prince: Yes, it did. We paid very highly for it, but Jerry was just spectacular at staging.

Did you all recognize that the Fosse choreography was something special at the time?

Harold Prince: Yeah, absolutely. The first time you saw, "Steam Heat," you could see he had a very, very uniquely defined style, with the hats and the whole thing. Sexy. He too wanted to direct.

Your career as a director really took off with Cabaret. To this day that show seems quite revolutionary.

Harold Prince: I believe it was, and I believe it has been copied probably. You can't copy West Wide Story. You can't even copy Phantom of the Opera, though God knows a lot of people have tried, trying to do Dracula or the Hunchback, but you can't. But Cabaret, you can copy the technique. You can have an MC under a different guise. You can have vaudeville numbers separated from the book. Chicago did that some years later. The Act, the show that Liza Minnelli was in, did that. It keeps coming back as a form. I think we were the first. Nobody is ever the first, but nobody has ever pointed out where it was ever done before.

It also had a dark tinge that hadn't been seen in musical before.

Harold Prince: Well, that takes you back to where I went to theater when I was eight years old. Every once in a while, they'd take me to a musical. Let me just share two musical plots with you. One was called Too Many Girls, a big hit of Rodgers and Hart. My mom took me to that, and the plot basically was the ingenues at Pottawatomie College wore beanies, but when they didn't have the beanie on, it meant that they were no longer virgins. The heroine came out on stage in the second act without a beanie, and the audience went nuts laughing. That was that plot. Another one was an Ethel Merman show called Something for the Boys, and it was a Cole Porter show -- big hit during the war -- and in it, she's got graphite in her teeth, and so her teeth inadvertently became a message center for Nazi spies. I rest my case.

So Cabaret had something serious on its mind. Was it risky at that time to put on something that had that gravity?

Harold Prince: I don't know. I guess it is. You know, when people would say, "They are doing that Nazi musical in rehearsal over there!" none of that ever got to me. I do have a story about West Side Story.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We were in rehearsal, I think, at what is now the Richard Rodgers, the 46th Street Theater, and I am standing on the street, and I was getting some air, and Leland Hayward walked by. I had been in his office working at one point. Abbott had sent me over to work for him. And he said, "What are you doing?" and I said, "We're doing West Side Story," and he put an arm on my shoulder, and he said, "Good. It's time you had a flop," and walked on down the street smiling. It was meant in a jocular fashion, but it spoke for the industry and what everybody thought. Nobody knows.

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