Harold Prince Interview (page: 6 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

A few years after Cabaret came your first so-called concept musical, Company, with Stephen Sondheim, and that seemed to take yet another step away from the old world of musical comedy.

Harold Prince: Yes, for sure. That was nonlinear. We did two shows in a row that were not linear storytelling.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. George Furth had written a bunch of plays, and Steve said to me, "I have a friend name George Furth who has written a bunch of one act plays for Kim Stanley to star in. When you read them, it doesn't seem to be happening, though she is very interested." So I read seven plays, and I said, "Well, you know, all I could see reading them -- he writes great, Steve -- but all I could see was Kim Stanley running to make costume and wig changes and makeup changes. It just exhausted me. That's as far as my imagination would take me, but I'll tell you what, it's a musical." And he said, "It is?" and he called George and we met in my office, and I said, "Yes, guys. It's a musical," and they went and struggled, and Steve brilliantly figured out how to write a score for a show that did not move the show along, where the songs were not internal to the scenes, preserving George Furth's unique writing and at the same time amplifying the relationships between scenes, interrupting a scene, and doing a number and so on. It's a very uniquely contrived and brilliant score, and I felt comfortable in the birthday parties, which were dark. It all started with a birthday, ended with a birthday, and they reappeared. They're right up my alley. That's something that got added to the show. The show bubbles a lot of the time, but there is a dark spine somewhere there.

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How was that received initially?

Harold Prince: Like most of the work, some good reviews, some ghastly reviews. There's a picture of Steve and me with our arms around each other in dinner clothes, and I had just told him the review in the Times was lousy, and we just kept smiling while the guy took our picture.

This is for Company?

Harold Prince: For Company. But you know, you always have your champions. LoveMusik is very much like that. We've had mixed reviews and some spectacular exponents of this form and the way this show works. That's what you want.

You were also very instrumental in the development of the show, Follies.

Harold Prince: Yeah. It was another show when we started. At first it was called, "The Girls Upstairs," after a great song Steve wrote.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It was a realistic show about a bunch of people who go to a theater and get very drunk and start to fight with props that were on the walls from an old musical. It eluded me. So what happened was we added ghosts, we added other people. We added alter egos for everybody in the cast, and a terrific sense of mystery -- À la recherche du temps perdu. We wanted to put something gauzy and melancholy on that stage, while telling the story of lost dreams and so on, and the guys did brilliantly. Then, of course, the apotheosis, the big moment in the thing, was when the four leading characters -- and the four leading characters in their youth -- all converged on stage, circled each other, screamed at each other, and that erupted in a Follies section, a real Ziegfeld Follies section.

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Company got kind of a mixed response. There were a lot of quizzical expressions in the critical community. It's amazing that, after that, you decided to go even further, in Follies.

Harold Prince: Well, two things. One is Steve said, "I won't write Company unless you agree to do Follies right after it," because Follies was ready and Company wasn't. So I said, "Of course, I do, but we have to get it to this next stage." So I am sure glad I did it, but that was one of the reasons. The other reason is Company paid back its investment. Follies was the most expensive musical ever done up to that time, with more costumes, more scenery, more everything. It cost $800,000. That's all. Today, you can't do a straight play for $800,000.

Unfortunately, we can barely touch on all of these shows that you have been a part of, but we certainly want to hear about Sweeney Todd.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: Sweeney was very much Steve's show. I didn't get it. I got it as I went along. It's about revenge, and I don't think I am a vengeful guy. I don't think I feel revenge. I recognize its existence. The idea of it drains me, you know. It hurts my energy level. So it's about revenge, but I got into it, and I got into it because it's very possible I imposed something on it. No one else who has done it since has ever done that. I wanted it to have some social significance, and I realized the story takes place during the beginning of the Industrial Age in England, and that all of these people -- obviously, it turns to cannibalism -- some of them don't even know that they're inadvertently cannibals, but basically, I thought they are all sharing one thing. They never breathe clean air. They never see sunlight. From the day they're born to the day they die, they're victims. So I said to Eugene Lee, "Let's do it in a factory, and let's put a glass roof on it that makes it claustrophobic, and let's tell all of these people that they are in the same spot really as the two leading characters in the play, that they're all victims of the industrial age." This is a time when kids were on the assembly line for 14 hours a day doing piecework and so on, and that pulled the whole show together for me. Oddly enough, it has never been done (that way) since. There certainly are detractors who think, "Why did he bother?" but I bothered because it made it possible for me to direct it, and I did a good job.

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Have you seen the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company?

Harold Prince: I have not seen Company. I saw Sweeney Todd with Michael Cerveris. I saw it actually in London first, with that company, and it was so totally different that I had a fine time. Honestly, I didn't think it was clear. It ran for eight or nine months, but I think a lot of the audience had seen the show before, so they could follow the story in the second act. I wasn't sure they could remotely follow the story if they didn't have some familiarity with it, because it is a very complicated story.

You and Sondheim had a big disappointment, initially anyway, with Merrily We Roll Along.

Harold Prince: That was a big flop. That was a disaster, and we worked very hard and made quite a good show of it. I think we were hurt by a decade of what seemed to everybody like unceasing success and too many awards and too much publicity that you don't seek. I think it hurt us. So we were not allowed to work on it. Everybody watched it, from the first preview, when it wasn't working, until it closed, when we thought it was well on the way to working. If it had had someone else's name on it, it might very well have gotten a chance. There's a small story there where I was not true to myself, and I will always feel guilty.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Whatever I did with that show, I was convinced that it should be done Our Town style, on a bare stage in a theater with nothing, and just some racks of clothes that kids would put on to play scenes, and I called my office together, my staff, and I said, "I can't see this show in scenery. I can't see this show in costumes. These kids are playing life, and it goes awry." It's backwards in time, and they said, "You must do what you must do," and I didn't, because I thought, "We're going to charge people... " whatever it was in those days, $20 a seat. "We are going to charge them to walk into a theater where there's nothing on the stage." And I didn't have the guts. Big mistake. I should have done that, and you know, I regret it.

That show is coming back.

Harold Prince: It comes back. It comes back often, and they just keep changing it. They do it with older people playing young people. I still prefer young people playing old people. I still think that was right, but they've never brought it all the way back. Eric Schaeffer did a production here that they thought would get to Broadway. It hasn't. Steve Sondheim's score is dazzling. Furth's book is wonderful and a little complicated in places. But really, I will never get past wishing I had listened to myself, but I ran scared.

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