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

What were the most meaningful legacies of people in your life, like George Abbott? What did you learn?

Harold Prince: Well Abbott, very simply, told a lot of people the same thing: self-discipline, that the theater is a job you have to do. You have no time to indulge because you are making, quote, "art," end quote. Show up on time, get the work done. That's a huge thing to learn.

Don't you find you sometimes have to indulge the artists you work with?

Harold Prince: No, no. Honor their difficulties, but don't encourage their neuroses, because nothing creative comes out of that. Abbott was also the one who said, "You're a director." All you need in this world as a young person is one person who knows and who you respect to say, "You can do this. Do it." Because most people are telling you, "You can't" and "Don't." I also learned something quite interesting from Jerry Robbins.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I have two left feet, but my direction is characterized, I think, in some of the best work, by movement, and by how I will move a block of people you would call an ensemble or a chorus. And they are moving the way dancers would move. Their feet aren't doing anything, because I wouldn't know how to tell them that, but I can move them. Jerry moved people diagonally across the stage, from upstage down, directly downstage, turn around, move directly upstage. Strange energies come from all of that. The theater that he entered and that I entered moved laterally. They'd drop a drop, and things would move from left to right or right to left. They changed the scenery upstage. You would open... there would be doors. I haven't had a door in a show for as long as I can remember. That whole world of inviting the audience to use its imagination and fill in the blank spaces is the difference between what I do and what people who do realistic films and so on do. Films weren't always realistic. I love old black-and-white silent films. They were forced perspective and all kinds of strange wonderful things that I use in the theater.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

That also speaks of a respect you have for the audience, that they will be able to fill in the blanks.

Harold Prince: I should also mention Orson Welles.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I am a huge admirer, as you know, of Welles. It started with that Mercury Theater production. I do think Citizen Kane is as nourishing to me, a theater director, as anything I have ever done. Some of the work I have done is an homage. If you take a look at the opera scene in Phantom of the Opera, believe me, I wasn't thieving, but I was certainly totally paying homage to the opera scene in Citizen Kane.

You mentioned Kazan, also.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I thought he (Kazan) was just wonderful. I love larger than life. I love people tearing into the theater and saying, "It is a black box." The energy! There is an energy there that you can really harness, that is harder on film. Kazan made some great films. On the Waterfront is such a great film, and the film version of Streetcar is extraordinary, but Streetcar seems like the play to me, seems like a play in a claustrophobic place, with people giving performances that they gave on the stage.

For all of the great classic musicals we have been talking about, there were some failures along the way.

Harold Prince: You bet.

Even with the breadth of experience that you've had, can you ever know for sure if something is going to succeed or not?

Harold Prince: No. You really don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It is also very important that you make the distinction between "success and failure" and "hit and flop." Follies was a huge success that lost all of its investment money. Hits are shows that do well at the box office, and some of them, I wouldn't want my name on.

It must be very painful when things don't work out the way you hope. How do you keep going?

Harold Prince: It's more painful to a whole lot of other people. I don't nurse things, and I move on. I don't spend a lot of time looking back. I am very lucky. I have been married a long time now, for 45 years, and I have somebody who loves the theater and is extremely encouraging and encourages the hard part of it, the part where I am risking much more.

I have a show right now called LoveMusik which has played a limited engagement in New York, ten weeks or something, but to full houses, and I am as proud of it as anything that I have ever worked on. I am sure it will be back, from the amount of interest there is in Europe and around the world. It is going to be done in London and in Tokyo and in Israel, and all this in just these 10 weeks. The contracts are all out. So that's what I'm working for now, because it's authentically its own show. Those people who do not recognize it in a comfortable way are the same people who were walking out on West Side Story. What we are talking about is the difference in audiences today and just a whole shift in the entertainment industry. It is focused on making money, not often, but infrequently hitting the jackpot. And that does happen infrequently.

When LoveMusik was opening, you said in an interview that you weren't quite sure what to call it, in terms of form. So you're still definitely pushing the envelope.

Harold Prince: Well, it is the most fun I have had in a very long time. We went back and sat the other night, and it just makes me feel good that I still have those priorities and the energy is there. I love the people I worked with. Not only the cast, who are extraordinary actors, but Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations are magnificent.

Wasn't it hard to get the Kurt Weill Foundation to agree to using his music?

Harold Prince: It's never easy to get the Weill Foundation, but they trust me. Also, I worked with Lotte Lenya in Cabaret, and we were very close. Now I am some sort of emeritus member of the Weill Foundation. She actually put me on the Kurt Weill Foundation before she died. She was forming it, and she said, 'We need somebody young." Is that a laugh? I was younger than most of them.

You've got more new projects, don't you?

Harold Prince: I have another one. A big musical this time. Maybe a year and a half away. It's written. The book is by Richard Nelson, who is a great playwright and quite well known here and in England. The lyrics are by Ellen Fitzhugh, who sort of took a break from the theater to have a family, and she is back working. Jonathan Tunick is co-writing the score with someone else. I am going to keep that a secret. It's based on a book by the marvelous Austrian novelist named Joseph Roth, who wrote The Radetzky March, which is a great novel. This is based on another one.

Well, long may you direct and produce. Thank you for this great interview.

Harold Prince: It was a great pleasure.

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