“No show gets a free ride because you had a success before. You’re as naked as you were the first day you worked, and you better make it good.” For more than half a century, Harold Prince produced or directed many of the most successful and influential musicals on Broadway. [singing] “The Pajama Game.” [singing] “West Side Story.” [singing] [singing] “Fiddler on the Roof.” [singing] And “Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history. [singing] [singing] Prince, perhaps more than anyone else, trailblazed a new direction for the modern musical. We sat down with this Broadway titan in September 2008, to discuss his career and the astounding 21 Tony awards he has won, more Tonys than anyone else. “It’s a nice thing to get them, but they are not a measure. ‘West Side Story.’ That never got a Tony. That was history-making, but not celebrated at its time. History is littered with great works of art that got terrible reviews originally. And they survived.” Harold Prince was born in 1928 and raised in New York City during the Great Depression. As a young boy, his family often took him to the theater, where he loved to escape. “I was a very solitary kid. I had a theater made of cardboard, and I would listen to the opera on Saturdays and Milton Cross would tell the story of the opera.” Announcer: “The opera house is in complete darkness for this opening storm-raging scene.” “And I would move little tin people around on the stage. It was my solitary, imaginative world. The world that I conjured up in my head was much more real than the world outside.” But the hardships of the Great Depression took its toll on Prince. And at the age of 14, he had what he says was a nervous breakdown. “I wandered the street having kind of conversations in my head. I came to my parents and said, I think there’s something really wrong. It’s just a black cloud over everything. And within a space of about three months, it began to go away. The legacy of it was that I came out of it a different person — extremely ambitious. I wanted what I wanted, and I was going to get it.” He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. “I came back to New York. And then I thought, what am I going to do?” What he did was write a letter to George Abbott, Broadway’s most important producer and director at the time, asking for a job. “I said, I would like to work for you. I live with my parents and the subway’s a nickel. I can afford to work for six months for nothing. And here was the clincher — if you can tell that you’re not paying me, then fire me, please. It’s a very intriguing thing.” Abbott took Prince under his wing, employing him primarily as an assistant stage manager. By 1954, after a two-year stint in the Army, an opportunity came his way — a book about a strike in a pajama factory, courtesy of his friend and future producing partner, Robert Griffith. “Bobby Griffith called me one day and said, there’s a book review in The Times. It seems like a musical. I called around to find the agent. He said, you know I’ve had another offer. Leland Hayward has made an offer. And I think there will be other offers. What can you guys give me that would persuade me? We said, well, if we could talk George Abbott into directing it, would that interest you? He said, if you can talk George Abbott into directing it, the book is yours.” [singing] Reporter: “This was your first show and you had a hit.” “Huge hit. Huge hit. On the opening night at the St. James Theater, Bobby Griffith and I were on either side of the stage. And when the show was over, we simply walked across the stage and embraced each other. It was a giant smash, long lines the next day, and so on.” Directed by Abbott and Jerome Robbins, and choreographed by Bob Fosse, “The Pajama Game” won the Tony award for best musical. “It’s often very hard to follow a hit with another hit. There’s a sophomore jinx, but you did.” “Yeah. Well, George Abbott found a book called ‘The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.’ He said, I think it’d make a good musical. Want to do it? A year later, we opened. It was a hit.” [singing] “Damn Yankees,” a tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil to help the Washington Senators win the pennant. It was directed by Abbott, and again, choreographed by Fosse. [singing] Then came a landmark in Prince’s career. Stephen Sondheim had become a good friend. But in the mid-1950s, Prince had become a Broadway success, and Sondheim was still hoping for his first Broadway credit. “He was working on what became ‘West Side Story.’ He was Lenny Bernstein’s lyricist.” The show lost its producer while in development and was without financing. Prince told Sondheim that he and Robert Griffith were interested in producing it. “I said, could you put together the authors? And we would hear the score. Steve had been told by Lenny never to play the score for anyone. So I went to Bernstein’s apartment and Lenny played the score. And I started to hum along the score, and he stopped halfway through it and said, that’s what I’ve always wanted: A musical producer who really understands music. And I never did tell him that I’d heard the score dozens of times.” [singing] [singing] “We loved it and turned to them and said, we’ll do it. But we have to raise the money very quickly. We had such a successful track record that, I’d say, we’re doing a musical. Please tell us within the next 24 hours whether you want in. And within 24 hours, everyone was in. And we had it.” [singing] “West Side Story” made its debut on Broadway in 1957. “It was not as big a hit as the first two. That I would stand at the back of the theater and I thought, you’re backstage at theater history. And by God, you’re a small part of it.” [singing] In 1961, Prince suffered a major shock when his producing partner, Robert Griffith, died suddenly. “Bobby was playing golf and had a heart attack and died the next day. I was at the hospital. And I mean, what could be more shocking? He was in his 50s. And I thought, you know, it’s sort of the end of the world. I really relied on him enormously.” Prince had already been thinking about doing more than producing hits and the loss of his producing partner spurred him on. “What I really wanted to do was that cliché. What I really want to be is a director.” His first notable hit was “She Loves Me” in 1963. [singing] Then in 1966, came his groundbreaking musical, “Cabaret,” based on Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” and with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. [singing] “I’ve always thought the two years in Uncle Sam’s army provided a deductible. I used to hang out in Stuttgart in a cheesy, bombed-out church cellar where there was an M.C. — you can see what’s coming — and three bovine chorus women. And I just loved it. I sat at the bar for hours and hours and this little guy, painted with lipstick and false eyelashes, who was about as funny as the entertainer, but tragic and wonderful. And I came back with him all those years later and I said, we should create a role for the M.C.. He is the entertainer, but we should make him metaphorical. He should represent Berlin and the depths of the Depression — eager to please, hopeless, bad taste, energetic. And as the evening goes on, he should turn into the Nazis. So that by the time the evening is over, he’s pulled Germany out, but he’s consummate evil.” [singing] “Cabaret” was a revelation. It moved the musical away from straightforward storytelling and into a fragmented narrative form, one that would influence much that came after it, including such landmark musicals as “A Chorus Line” in Chicago. “You have to express yourself, not the status quo, by being more daring, by really expressing who you are, and by making the musicals what you think musicals should be.” “Cabaret” established Prince as a director. And then he reunited with Sondheim and they created show after show. “Company,” with its non-linear libretto about a man of 35 afraid to commit to a relationship. “Follies,” about a reunion of chorus girls in a ruined theater 30 years after their youthful success. “A Little Night Music,” based on a movie by Ingmar Bergman. And “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” [singing] “Directing, I had to hopefully find something of myself. It was a lot easier when you’re working with Steve Sondheim, let me tell you, because he was of the same mind. And he was courageous as hell.” More hits came in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Prince and Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up to make “Evita” and “Phantom of the Opera.” “He said, I’m thinking of a musical idea. Do you think there’s anything in ‘Phantom of the Opera?’ And I said, I’ll do it. And he said, why do you want to do it so much? I said, because it’s romantic. Let’s do a Victorian romance, larger than life. Let’s take the theater and turn it into another world, and have the audience come in from the street and just enter that world, like so many children. Put a mantel of romance over them.” [singing] “The very thing that brought me into the theater in the first place: escape.” [singing] Prince’s own imagination continued to challenge theatergoers. “I’m trying desperately not to be the old director who tells anecdotes to the company, instead of directs the play. I live for the next musical. I live in the future. I’m totally mindful that nobody will ever have the life I’ve had in the theater. That’s past. And that’s damn sad.”