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Harold, the Prince of Broadway musicals

by Steve Warren

He's not producing, only directing his current efforts, but Harold Prince claims he's never felt compromised by doing both jobs at once. He just puts together the best show he can without worrying about what will sell tickets: "I proImise you I have never thought about it-ever. Some of the failures. are my favorite shows-'Follies' and 'Pacific Overtures." "

Many of last season's expensive flops were well-done by the oldstandards, Prince says, but "time has passed them by." Prince's latest efforts, "Evita" and "Sweeney Todd," on the other hand, "are not commercially crafted. I don't think anyone thought of them that way."

He laughs that a plot summary of "Sweeney Todd"-about a murderous barber whose mistress bakes his victims into meat pieshardly sounds like the stuff hit musicals are made of: "My mother said, 'What are you talking about?'"

"Evita," a lavish biography of Eva Peron, doesn't sound like exactly what American ticket buyers have been waiting for, either. But on May 13, the 25th anniversary of his emergence as a major figure in the American musical theatre, Prince had more cause for celebration than he had had in many years.

"Evita" was nearing the end of its first year in London and still had a healthy advance sale; the Broadway-bound American production had opened in Los Angeles the week before to good business and generally laudatory reviews. And the Tony nominations had boosted "Sweeney Todd's" boxoffice past the $200,000 weekly mark; after a shaky beginning (it lost money its first four weeks) that show was starting to look like a hit.

"The best thing that ever happened to me," Prince bubbles, "is that both of them have worked 'Sweeney Todd' could have folded in a week and it would have been the ultimate discouragement to (composer Stephen) Sondheim and me... There's a point where even if you're foolish enough to do it they're not foolish enough to give you the money."

While Prince and Sondheim have revolutionized musical theatre in the last decade they've done it at the expense of their backers, with two costly flops ("Follies" and "Pacific Overtures") against two successes ("Company" and "A Little Night Music"), one of them marginal.

"I think 'Company,' which barely made it in 1970, could be a smash today," Prince speculates. "I think 'Follies' could make it, too."

So why not revive them? The most common complaint about Prince/Sondheim shows is that they're ahead of their time.

"Unless they could be revived precisely the way we (Sondheim and I) did them-or improved upon, and we're not too egotistical to allow for that possibility-we won't let them be done."

Legend says that Prince and Sondheim met in 1948 on the opening night of "South Pacific." It sounds like a cliche from an old

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summering in Spain. "The music got me going," he says. "I was hooked." But he found many faults with their concept and how they developed it, and sent them a long letter detailing his criticism.

Photo by Steve Warren Harold Prince's recent hit musical "Sweeney Todd" doesn't fit the old Broadway formula for commercial success. movie, but then many of Prince's innovations have come from imposing cinematic form upon the stage. Their first collaboration was "West Side Story," for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's music. Producer Prince already had "The Pajama Game," "Damn Yankees" and "New Girl In Town" to his credit.

In 1970 they joined to give us "Company," ushering in a new era of musicals with wit and sophistication and more psychological insight than plot or dramatic structure in the traditional sense. No one quite understood it, but they sensed that it was special; and New York being what it is, "Company" became the show to see that year.

"Follies" (1971) offered more of the same in a spectacular production set at a reunion of show business has-beens. Because it was so expensive to stage it lost its entire $800,000 investment, despite a run of more than a year.

"A Little Night Music" (1973) added two new ingredients to the non-formula: Sondheim's only hit song ("Send In the Clowns") and a happy ending. The result waswonder of wonders-a financial success.

Sondheim wrote new lyrics to four songs in Prince's 1974'revamp of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide," but their next original creation was "Pacific Overtures," which opened in early 1976. Americans didn't know what to make of this Kabukinization of the Americanization of Japan, so they made it disappear.

Prince says his involvement with "Evita" began four years ago when composers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice broght him the demo tape for their album while he was

"It was a long time before I heard from them, and then it was a simple 'Thank you very much.' I thought they hated me... A year later they came to my office... with a copy of their record. They told me it was the number-one album in England and had the number-one single, too; and they asked me if I wanted to do the show. I said I thought they didn't want me because of my letter and they said, 'No, we just decided we had to put you off until we got the record finished, because you were talking about a show and we were talking about a record.'"

The director was booked up for the next year and a half, but the young Englishmen agreed to wait for him. London critics affirmed that he was worth waiting for. The experience taught Prince something about putting a show together. "There's no road in England," he relates. "There's no place to try the show out of town and they put a limit on the number of previews-l think it's nine-you can have before you open. I enjoyed not being indulged with too much rehearsal time. I did the same thing with 'Sweeney Todd." "

He seems to contradict himself when he speaks of his appreciation for the California summer that preceded "Evita's" Broadway opening: "Sixteen weeks is about the time I think necessary for a play to really hit its stride. I went back... and saw 'Sweeney Todd'... three months after it opened and it was

finally the show I wanted." "Evita" changed constantly over the summer, he says, because "my taste changes."

While the London engagement would seem to have been the ultimate pre-Broadway tryout, Prince swears, I didn't do 'Evita' thinking it would make it to America."

A major change in adapting the show for our shores was to make it "more political... I think American audiences require that," Prince says. Some minor changes were made in the lyrics during the recording of the original cast album, which was done in Los Angeles over a two-week period instead of in the usual, grueling one-day session.

Prince admits to feeling "a certain amount of responsibility" in dealing with historical events: "We've tried to avoid being totally biased." He's also insisted on accuracy, but realizes that using facts selectively can have as much influence as fictionalizing them. So much good material is available, he says, that "a show about Eva Peron should run five days."

Prince says the show is "much more about media than about the Perons. We're in a horrifying media-oriented period." He uses projections in "Evita" to show the size of real people. against their media images. "I always hated meeting heroes. No matter how heroic they were, they were always human." (Indeed Prince, an unprepossessing man, looks smaller the closer one gets to him.)

What is the director's own feeling about his central character? "i think she was a villain, all right. It was a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But there was a sympathetic part that drew me to her. It was impotence." He explains that being a woman, illegitimate and poor in Argentina in the '30s she had virtually no chance of achieving anything. "The only way a woman could make it at all was... sexually... I admire the way Evita made a life for herself."

That life was as the power behind Juan Peron's throne when he was president of Argentina. She was a saint to the country's poor; but all she ever did for them was to make one of their number-herselfrich, giving false hope to the others. "There's no question she had glamor," the director says.

Evita is a natural heroine for gay audiences as she screws her way, one man at a time, from a smalltown slum to the Casa Rosada, residence of Argentina's first family. Early on she echoes the words of another queen of camp: "Birds fly out of here so... why the hell can't I?"

If Hal Prince can fill enough stages the American musical theatre will be in good shape; but who's looking out for the non-musical theatre? It's "not as audacious as it should be," Prince says. "I don't sense enough experimentation. Some very talented playwrights have been lost to us because they were indulged and never learned their craft."

But even good plays have to be handled properly to find an audi-

ence. "David Mamet's 'American Buffalo' is the best American play in years, but it opened on Broadway and only ran for a few performances. They should have opened it off-Broadway where it would have been a success and they would have had to move it to Broadway."

It's only the young we should expect to see taking chances, he says: "Later on you get used to certain comforts. It's not quite as exciting to be broke when you're older." Prince keeps an eye out for young talent, something he learned from George Abbott, the Broadway veteran who directed Prince's first hits: "Some members of the collaborative team should be young. That way you have a fair exchange-you teach them what you know from experience and they teach you what's going on." If you don't bring new blood in on each show, he says, there's a danger of falling back on what worked before and assuming it will work. again.

Although he's been burned twice, Prince hasn't abandoned the idea of working in film. He feels his first picture, "Something For Everyone," was badly marketed but says of the movie itself, "I'm very proud of it." In it Angela Lansbury created one of the great high camp characters of all time. The Countess von Ornstein deserves to rank with Margo Channing. Norma Desmond, Blanche DuBois and everyone Mae West ever played; but hardly anyone saw the picture. The director says he appreciates the cult status it has achieved, but commercial success "would have been nicer." Perhaps the world wasn't ready, in 1970, for the bisexual character Michael York was to play again three years later in "Cabaret." Prince agrees that "Something For Everyone" should be reissued-"if they could just figure out who owns it. Somebody tried to buy it and there was no one who could sell it to him."

He seems to harbor ill feelings about his screen version of "A Little Night Music" when he says he won't make another movie "unless I can make it the way I want to make it." There are "too many cooks" in the business, he laments. He has no specific project in mind. but knows that his next screen effort "won't be a musical. To me that's a contradiction in terms-a movie musical. It just doesn't work ... I know I could make a film very inexpensively, so nobody'd have to worry much." (Providing. of course, that no million-dollar stars like Liz Taylor are imposed on him.)

Because Prince is so avantgarde, it might be wise to let him make a picture, then put it away for five years before showing it to anyone. His '70s track record would include more successes if it werepossible to do that with Broadway shows.

But "Sweeney Todd" changed all that and "Evita" is likely to follow in its footsteps. leaving the theatre world breathlessly waiting for Hal Prince's next audacious project. whatever it may be.

GAY NEWSSept. 21, 1979