鈥淚 like heightened theatre,鈥� says director-producer Harold Prince. 鈥淚鈥檓 into ideas. I鈥檓 into settings, venues. I鈥檓 into conflict. I have a political mind, I think. And so it permeates.鈥�
Indeed, it has permeated his six decades of work and 65 Broadway productions. Many think of spectacle when they think of Prince, but his shows ran the gamut from opulence to simplicity鈥攎ore often than not the audience filling in the gaps with their imaginations to remember a picture Prince created indirectly. His joy has always been building worlds.
With Prince of Broadway opening tonight at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, audiences take in the worlds of 16 of his shows. A man who relishes in contradictions, the variety of shows all belonging to one catalog (the Prince catalog, that is) and put together for Prince of Broadway is the subtle contradiction of this revue. 鈥淣o show is particularly stamped with my involvement. I鈥檝e worked on everything,鈥� he says.
Still, Prince knew when he was the right person for the job and when he wasn鈥檛. 鈥淲hen David Merrick offered me Hello, Dolly! I said, 鈥業鈥檓 the wrong person.鈥� And Gower Champion was sure as hell the right person. Same thing happened with 42nd Street, Gower Champion was again the right person.鈥�
But Prince never cowered from a challenge or something new if he felt he could do it justice. 鈥淲hen they gave me On The Twentieth Century, it was one of the rare occasions when I hadn鈥檛 been offered any in a while and I wasn鈥檛 working on anything,鈥� he recalls. 鈥淐omden and Green and Cy Coleman brought me that and I thought, 鈥業鈥檝e never done farce. I don鈥檛 know whether I can do pratfalls and people walking into walls and stuff so if you want to take that chance with me I鈥檒l do it.鈥� I learned how to do it.鈥�
And then there were the moments that an idea took hold of Prince and he was the one to bring it to fruition. 鈥淵ou take a show like Cabaret,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he first day of rehearsal of that show, I presented to the company a photograph from the centerfold of LIFE magazine and it was of these guys, white guys with blonde hair and crosses, naked to the waist, snarling and I said, 鈥榃here was this picture taken?鈥� Well the obvious answer is Nazi Germany. Well it wasn鈥檛. It was Little Rock, Arkansas, and they were snarling at a little black girl who was going to a white school. My point was it can happen anywhere that human beings live.鈥� He used that photograph as one of the many inspirations for Cabaret. Because it all starts with an idea before he creates the world.
