You can probably learn more from a total failure than you can from a total hit. I watched in amazement as Mr. Prince swiftly put the show on its feet, and then ordered overnight rewrites. He was efficient and basically unflappable, with the confidence of a workman who had forced many unlikely contraptions to stand.

Still, I was surprised to notice, smug as I was, how heavily he leaned on his pet staging ideas, those moving scaffolds and catwalks that made even late-19th-century Norway look like an erector set. And wasn’t his taste for pat symbolism a bit gauche? Dancers representing love and death wandered through the action like Munch characters escaped from a museum.

What took longer to realize was how those tropes of the “concept” musical, which Mr. Prince pioneered and which other directors have run with ever since, were countered by the immense practical knowledge acquired over a life in the theater. In his bones he understood the different effects that could be produced by placing an actor in one position or in another, two feet away. By moving a song to a moment in the action five minutes later. By replacing that song with one whose temperature was 10 degrees colder.

Gradually, with these kinds of adjustments and more, the show got better. Not enough better to keep everyone happy, as I learned when I inadvertently became involved in an intrigue.

One morning, Mr. Prince casually announced that he wanted to see the apprentices — there were two that day — during the first rehearsal break. When we met, he said, more or less, “I’m going to cover my eyes now so that you won’t know which of you I’m talking about.” The other apprentice and I gulped as one.

“It has come to my attention that one of you has been having conversations with someone on the creative team about problems with the show. I can understand your having problems with the show. So do I. Yes, some of the lyrics are bad. Have you ever wondered why I place the chorus facing upstage” — away from the audience — “when they have to sing the worst of them?”

It had not occurred to me, yet now that I thought of it, I realized he’d made a lot of improvements by hiding things.