Michael Riedel's Interview with Hal Prince, the legendary Broadway Producer

Hal Prince was watching the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards on TV last January when he turned to his wife and started babbling in gibberish. “Get dressed” she said, “we’re going to the hospital.” On the eve of his 80th birthday, Prince,whose credits include WEST SIDE STORY, EVITA, FOLLIES and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, had suffered a stroke. But now, only seven months later, he’s back at work, feisty, charming, opinionated, very funny and gearing up for his 61st show, PARADISE LOST, which he’ll direct in the Spring, possibly starring Mandy Patinkin, John Cullum, Judy Kaye and Schuler Hensley with music by the waltz king, Johan Strauss.
At the start of the new theatre season—one that could be rocky, given the economy—I wanted to get Prince’s view of Broadway, his stomping ground since 1936, when, at age 8, he saw his first show. Asked if he thinks the boom that Broadway’s been enjoying for the last 10 years is about to go bust, he says: “Boom is an economic word; it does not mean quality. And that’s where my head is at. There have been a lot of shows, but how many of them do what theatre should be doing: ‘Astonish me!’?”
Prince is too diplomatic to mention names, but the implication is that tourist-friendly family fare such as MARY POPPINS, LEGALLY BLONDE, SHREK and GREASE hardly fit the ‘Astonish me!’ bill. He says: “The problem is that there are too few creative producers. There are a lot of people who are writing checks—and I’m glad they’re making out those checks—but can they honestly say when they are holding their Tony Award, ‘Did I create this show? Or did I just write a check?’ Broadway should be a money-earning, artistic enterprise,” he adds. “There has been a lot of money around. But isn’t it time to put the ‘art’ back in?”
His rule of thumb is that “if you think it’s going to be commercial, chances are it won’t be. FIDDLER, CABARET, WEST SIDE STORY---nobody should have done those shows. They weren’t ‘commercial.’” Prince, whose first show, THE PAJAMA GAME, was budgeted at $169,000, worries about the costs of putting on a show, although he thinks some headway was made during last year’s stagehand strike. “But,” he says, “I used to produce a show a year. If one didn’t work, maybe the next one did. I made a living in the theatre. You can’t do that anymore. You can’t produce a show a year when each one costs $14million.”
He’s no fan of reality-TV shows such as ‘GREASE: You’re the One that I want’ and ‘LEGALLY BLONDE: The Search for Elle Woods.’ “There’s only one word for them—appalling.”
Sneaky ways to jack up ticket prices—aisle seats with a $25 surcharge, for instance—also leave him cold. “I don’t think any of that is appealing,” he says. “And what about the $1.50 ‘maintenance fee’ on each Broadway ticket? Why should the audience maintain the theatre? Isn’t that what the theatre owner is supposed to do?”—M. Riedel