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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
I think it's very important in the commercial theater to return the investment. I know there are fewer and fewer people who agree with me, because the investor now is so wealthy in his own right that he's the producer. So you look at a Broadway show today, and you will see a whole lot of names over the title, and really who they are is the people who put up the money to put the show on. They can take a loss if it doesn't happen, and it's a shot at a Tony Award and all that sort of thing. They enjoy the theater, but it isn't the safeguard that I think It doesn't restrain you, the way it did us, to have to make it a good investment. Let's see if I can make sense out of this. After a bunch of successes at the box office, it gave us the right to have failures that did something we divined was important for the musical theater form. In other words, you could say to the investor -- and I would do it in a letter -- "I am not certain you'll ever see this money again, but you've been doing just fine," and then we'd do Follies or Pacific Overtures. You'd do a show that you had to do for artistic reasons, that in fact, ultimately, in the case of both of those shows, are somewhat historical, but they never returned a plug nickel to anybody. But the investors didn't care, because they took pride in being part of the process.
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