Hal Prince obituary

No single figure in American popular theatre was associated with so many enduring hits as the Broadway director and producer Harold “Hal” Prince. Prince, who has died aged 91, was assistant stage manager for Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam in 1951, and went on to produce West Side Story (1960), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He graduated to directing, which he considered his true calling, with Cabaret (1966), Company (1970), A Little Night Music (1973), Evita (1979) and Phantom of the Opera (1986).

The songwriters Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jason Robert Brown, and the teams Bock and Harnick and Kander and Ebb, were said to have done their best work with Prince. Choreographers in important Prince productions included Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett. As producer or director, Prince won 21 Tony awards, including, in 2006, a special award for lifetime achievement.

Prince continually sought to bring fresh, serious, vital subjects to a Broadway that was often considered predominantly an entertainment medium. Even his lightest shows had serious dimensions, such as the labour union dilemmas of The Pajama Game (1954) and the use of pop art in It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman (1966). He took on bigger risks with subject matter such as the American Communist party in Flora the Red Menace (1965), Nazi Germany in Cabaret and antisemitism in the deep south in Parade (1998).

As a director, Prince had few stylistic trademarks. He often used revolving sets to achieve cinematic flow and often presented characters as products of their environments. Pacific Overtures (1976) was full of Asian pageantry; the denizens of Sweeney Todd (1979) were dwarfed by industrial girders. Mostly, content dictated form in a directing method that was an outgrowth of Prince’s years as a producer. He meticulously assembled a team and then allowed them exceptional creative freedom.

Actors were expected to work out characterisations on their own – one reason why so many major stage personalities enjoyed early, career-defining moments in Prince shows. These included Liza Minnelli in Flora the Red Menace, Joel Grey in Cabaret and Madeline Kahn in On the Twentieth Century (1978). He created stars rather than hiring them. One exception was his 1977 film version of A Little Night Music starring Elizabeth Taylor.

Efficient as he was when producing, Prince the director was deeply intuitive. He admitted solving directing problems in his sleep. He drew from Japanese and Russian influences, with results so foreign to Broadway at that time that his most inventive shows were his least successful – Follies (1971) and Pacific Overture, for example – but also the most influential. Such achievements did not come easily. “There’s a real relationship between courage and fear,” he told the biographer Carol Ilson for Harold Prince: A Director’s Journey (2004). “It certainly figures in my life.”

Much of his productivity, Prince admitted later in his career, arose from fits of depression he suffered between projects, a condition that began in childhood with a nervous breakdown. He recalled being immobilised and unable to sleep for months. “Out of that, you create the person you want to be,” he said in 1988.

Prince was born in New York City, the son of Blanche (nee Stern) and Harold Smith. His parents divorced early and after his mother’s remarriage, Hal adopted the name of his stepfather, Milton Prince, a stockbroker. Once recovered from his breakdown, he was an energetic, alert young man who haunted the discount ticket booths on Broadway and offered to work without pay for the eminent Broadway director George Abbott.

Though Prince idolised Abbott, the contrast between the two personalities defined old and new Broadway. “I have a darker sensibility … I’m political, he’s not. I’m issue-oriented, he’s not,” Prince said in an interview with the US cable TV channel A&E. “He unabashedly wants people to have a good time, and sometimes I don’t give a damn. I want to stimulate them, but I don’t care so much. He thinks a good show is one that runs a long time. I couldn’t disagree more.”

One of Prince’s formative influences was the short-lived 1948 Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner show Love Life, a parable of moral decay depicting a single American family living through 150 years of history without ageing. Once Prince hit his stride as a director, he embraced non-realistic elements, such as using the Emcee in Cabaret (a character based on entertainers Prince observed during his military service in Germany) to represent the imploding soul of Nazi Germany, or the lavish Loveland sequence in Follies to dramatise an America emotionally starved by its own affluence. Still, when offered Hello Dolly! he turned down the surefire hit because he could not understand how a chorus could come out of the woodwork – less than realistically – in the title song.

Prince shows of the 1960s and 70s were as much in step with the burgeoning new social order as the more blatantly counterculture pop music scene, particularly his shows with Sondheim, who was mainly known as a lyricist when they first began working together on Company, the acclaimed, remarkably nuanced study of the institution of marriage. Besides the sheer quality of their work – which also included Follies, Pacific Overtures and A Little Night Music – these shows are still astonishing for having an emotional maturity and complexity on a level with Chekhov and Ibsen.

In that light, Prince’s single most successful show, Phantom of the Opera, represents a substantial step backwards. The opening of the show in London in 1986 ended the year-long sabbatical Prince took after a long string of flops. He had long wanted to create a purely romantic piece of theatre and the story inspired some of his most arresting stage pictures, such as the Phantom’s candle-lit underground lake. However, the plot and characters are archetypes of limited dimension. The storytelling is traditional and linear, which explains why such a popular show received mixed reviews: Prince had created new standards of theatrical integrity on Broadway and then tried to turn back the clock.

That change was only temporary. Both Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992) and Parade showed Prince to be as dramatically ambitious as ever, though their respective gestations showed the director going to great lengths to find a creative demilitarised zone amid the ever mounting commercial pressures of Broadway. The production of Follies that cost $800,000 in 1971 would be prohibitively and impractically expensive on Broadway 20 years later, Prince declared. He attempted to establish low-cost workshop arrangements where a show could be tested in front of an audience without critics. When that failed, he increasingly sought out non-New York venues (Kiss of the Spider Woman opened in Toronto) and the non-profit sector (Parade surfaced at Lincoln Center).

Prince’s 1997 Broadway revival of Candide, the Leonard Bernstein flop that he had famously rehabilitated in 1973, was limp and short-lived; Prince’s input is said to have been limited to an executive capacity.

He was reunited with two of his most famous collaborators to little effect. He bailed out of Whistle Down the Wind after hitting a creative impasse with Lloyd Webber during the 1996 tryout in Washington. Bounce, the Sondheim musical Prince took on after Sam Mendes decamped, was merely middleweight, and after its 2003 Washington run it was rewritten as Road Show.

Paradise Found (2010) failed to find favour and there was a long delay before The Prince of Broadway, a show revolving around Prince’s career, having premiered in Japan in 2015, at last arrived on Broadway in 2017.

However, the garrulous, forthright, remarkably unpretentious Prince, often with his glasses pushed up to his Florida-tanned forehead, continued tending to the health of the theatre industry.

He is survived by his wife, Judy (nee Chaplin), whom he married in 1962, a son, Charley, a daughter, Daisy, and three grandchildren, Phoebe, Lucy and Felix.

• Harold Smith Prince, producer and director, born 30 January 1928; died 31 July 2019