Harold Prince has dominated
Broadway for the last 40 years, either directing or producing many of the most successful and powerful
musicals of the last four decades. For his significant contribution to one of this country's most cherished arts forms, he has been honored with a record breaking 19
Tony Awards.
The 1960s introduced the era of Hal Prince as Broadway's most celebrated musical theater director with stagings of Zorba and his biggest success of the decade, Cabaret. Prince's artistic birth traces back to 1963 when he directed She Loves Me.
The '70s ushered in the partnership of Prince and Stephen Sondheim. They had first met, appropriately enough, in a theater at the first New York performance of South Pacific in 1949. Twenty years later they together transformed the notion of the concept musical, where theme takes precedence over plot, into art and changed the look and sound of Broadway forever. Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd each took the musical theater in different, uncharted, exhilarating directions. Their partnership ended with the commercial failure of 1980's Merrily We Roll Along. Additionally, without Sondheim, Prince directed three of the decade's biggest blockbusters, Candide, On the Twentieth Century, and Evita, unquestionably dominating Broadway for a generation.
Since 1980 Prince has had two extraordinary successes. In 1986, he reteamed with his Evita composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, for the international phenomenon The Phantom of the Opera, and in 1993 his groundbreaking Kiss of the Spider Woman won the Tony Award for best musical of the season. His latest work was the controversial Parade, based on the story of Leo Frank, with Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry. The exciting news that he will work with Sondheim once again on the next incarnation of Wise Guys has many theatergoers eagerly anticipating the future.
Information culled from various Playbill bio's.