Harold Prince Interview (page: 7 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

Tell us about working with Andrew Lloyd Webber. What drew you to this very different world?

Harold Prince: That started with Evita, one of the shows I am proudest of. He and Tim Rice came to me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was living in Spain. We were living in Majorca, and Tim actually arrived with a tape of this show about Eva Peron, and he played the tape, and I listened, and the opening number, which had been recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra -- they had that kind of money to do that -- and with a huge chorus, and I said, "This opening is 200,000 people in front of the Casa Rosada at Eva's funeral. Wow, it's so exciting I can't stand it! How the hell do you do that?" and I was hooked. So I sat down, listened to all of it, thought it was all marvelous, and wrote a 3,000-word letter saying what I thought should happen and what I would love to do, and I got back a letter saying, "We're doing a record, and your letter's terrific, but it is going to slow us down and just make us lose confidence. So thanks so much for the time and trouble," and I thought, "I'll never hear from them again," and they went on and did the record. A year and a half later, the record came out. It was a huge hit in Europe, and I am sitting in my office, and my receptionist says, "There are two young men in the front office who want to see you. They don't have an appointment," and I said, "I'll look." I looked. It was them, and they said, "We wanted to bring you the record. Now we're ready. Are you ready to do the show?" and I said, "Sure."

I was busy, and they had to wait another year for me, but it was one of the most exhilarating and extraordinary experiences. I insisted they put some spoken dialogue in it, not much, but in key places. Mostly, it's numbers. It's a sort of Brechtian style, and the energy of it really worked for all of us, and this show worked immediately in London. So that was my introduction to them.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The next time around, they had broken up. Tim was working on Chess, and Andrew wanted to do Phantom of the Opera. I was sitting in a restaurant, and he was sitting at the next table with Sarah Brightman, to whom he was then married, and he said, "Come over and have coffee," and he said, "I am thinking of Phantom of the Opera as a musical. What do you think?," and I said, "It is the perfect time for a romantic musical. Perfect. There hasn't been a romantic musical in years, and that's what I would like to see." That's often a criterion. I very often do what I wish I could see when I went to the theater. So it is sort of make your own theater really, and I signed on immediately, and we spent the next two years working on it. I spent a lot of flights back and forth to London. The scenery itself took nine flights there, and about three for (designer) Maria Bjornson. It needed to take an audience where an audience probably could not remember being, but it needed to take them back to being me, seeing Orson Welles at the age of eight in Julius Caesar. You needed to go in there and say, "I've just lost all my problems," all the years of patina that have developed, and crust, and just be in this other world, and insofar as it does that, it seems to have succeeded in its objective.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

The size of that whole show was risky, wasn't it? It's such an extravaganza.

Harold Prince: Yeah. I think it was risky. It was fun. There's a funny story attached to it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Our rehearsals started at 10:00 every morning in Lambeth, in a school, in a gymnasium, and when I would leave, having staged a section of it, sometimes 12:30, and then I would leave my assistant to review what I'd done, and then Gillian Lynne would take the rest of the time for choreography. There was some choreography in the show, and I wouldn't come back until the next day. So we rehearsed it for four weeks. At the end of four weeks, we had a run-through. At the end of the run-through, I said, "Next Monday, we meet in Her Majesty's Theatre. I've been over all of the props and the effects, and we are ready for you, and you have done a wonderful job." One of the cast raised a hand and said, "I have been delegated to ask you a question," and I said, "Go ahead. What is it?" "What do you do in the afternoon?"

I had never rehearsed in the afternoon. It just hadn't been necessary.

What was your answer?

Harold Prince: Oh, I made a cheap joke. I said, "I watch Coronation Street," which is a soap opera. I am sure it's not on in the afternoon. What I did was walk around a lot. I read. Anyway, we played nine previews. The final of the nine previews was the opening night.

That speaks of such confidence and discipline. You knew what you wanted to accomplish, you accomplished it, and you left.

Harold Prince: Maybe foolhardiness. Who knows? It worked in that case.

Is that how you work as a director? Are you really organized about what you want?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: I am very organized. I don't sit around and do little dots and drawings. When you first start directing -- the very first job I ever got, which was a stock job, directing -- you do little drawings of where you want your actors to go in the scenery. The first play was Angel Street. You know. Gaslight, I think the movie was called. And then you go in and you start to rehearse the actors, and then the actors, one of them says, "I would love to try going in that direction instead," and there is your whole job gone. Somebody who goes somewhere you didn't want them to go, what about all the rest of those people? So preparation is another kind of thing. Preparation is getting everything you need to know of a sensory nature about the characters, where the story is taking place, all those things. I mean what things smell like, taste like, sound like, and so on. That is an exercise you share with your designer as well. Boris Aronson taught me that years ago.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Didn't he work with you on Cabaret?

Harold Prince: Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Follies...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. He was the greatest designer that ever lived, I think. He would never design anything. I never saw him pick up a pen and draw something and say, "What do you think of this?" Instead, he'd say, "Let's talk about the food. Let's talk about what the restaurants were like. Let's talk about the sound on the street. Let's talk about..." So Cabaret, for one, was a black box with selective bits of scenery and one huge surprise. I looked at the model for the first time, and there was this waffled, wobbly, funhouse mirror angled at the audience. They came in and sat down, they could see this distorted view of themselves, and it's like saying, "That's your metaphor, folks!" Sort of like the factory in Sweeney.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

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