Hal Prince: All the World's a Musical

Winner of ten Tony awards as producer and/or director of such Broadway productions as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Candide, and Company, Hal Prince has practically redefined the modern American musical, swapping its persistent tradition of formulaic fluff and glossy chorus lines for social themes and theatrical vigor. Pacific Overtures, his latest offering, features an all-Asian cast, score by collaborator Steven Sondheim, and a story based on Matthew Perry's invasion on Japan, sailed out of its Boston try-outs last week (after meeting with some rough weather from the critics) for a January 11th docking on Broadway. Before leaving, though, Prince discussed the show, his career, and the Broadway theater with fifteen Harvard student directors participating in the Office for the Arts' "Learning From Performers" seminar series. What follows is culled from that two-hour meeting on November 20th.

The idea of doing the show started when John Weidman [scriptwriter] came to me about three years ago and suggested a realistic production of Perry's visit to Japan, and I said that same day, "Let's do it as Kabuki." It was an idea about a period of history which had consumed him when he was a student here at Harvard. Apparently I said that I wasn't interested in realistic theater, but that it could be fascinating if we'd do it from the point of view of a Japanese playwright utilizing the Kabuki style. We did not think of doing it as a musical for over a year and a half.

When he finished the play I said there was something missing, so I asked myself what? And I found out that in order to translate the Japanese poetical style into a style for Americans, it's got to be either blank verse, which I wanted no part of, or music with lyrics. I figured that only lyrics would give it the size that Kabuki has and that we lack. What we're doing is borrowing in contemporary terms from the Kabuki tradition; I refuse to do pure Kabuki because I wouldn't know how. I think anything can be a musical.

The only thing that came to me as a complete surprise with this show was the unpredictability of what we thought would be its final form. We had a run-through of the show a week-and-a-half ago in New York, the way we usually do, on a bare stage with no costumes, for the kids from Candide and some friends. It was, except for the West Side Story run-through, surely the most successful one I've ever had. People were just overwhelmed and said "This is the best thing you guys have ever done." I promise you that if you had talked to Steve and me then we would have both told you, and not smugly, that our best guess was that we were going to have to do next to nothing on this show. Well, the very same people who were knocked out by the show in New York came up here for opening night and said "What happened?" When we got here it turned out to be as much work as any show I've ever worked on.

I believe that if we left the show on a bare stage with no costumes it would still be about 85 per cent right. The trouble is we have scenery, costumes and orchestrations and they have put so much polish and elegance on the whole piece that I've got to make another show not to go along with the more primitive feeling I want. Even though I worked eight months on the scenery with Boris [Aronson], I've thrown out almost all of it until now I have a type of bare stage.

Maybe there's something worth saying in this: You can destroy a show like Pacific Overtures the day after it opens, or you can make a big hit out of it--and I suppose "hit" is the unfortunate word; a success for yourself out of it. Sure we're having to make a lot of changes, but one of the things I've learned from my own experiences as a director is that you don't change the obvious, uncomplicated problems first, because that will shake up a lot of other things. If I have to change the personnel in a song, for example--which I will--I can do it in two days and that number will work out just fine--when we're ready for it to work. In the meantine, though, the emotions of the various people involved in performing the number are protected while I work on the material that's really important, the material that I'm not sure about. Now the theater-goer pays a price for these delays, unfortunately, but that's what's called trying out.

The feeling around this show is, on everyone's part, that they're in something wonderful, that Asian actors have finally got to do something worthwhile and that the show is important. Kevin Kelly's review didn't bother a damn soul.

These actors want a hit. They want employment more than any other group I've ever worked with because there is no employment for Asian actors. They were waiting tables, being stenographers and working in advertising agencies. I found most of them in San Francisco and Los Angeles because that's where they get movie work playing Hirohito and coolies and acting in Kung-Fu movies, Hawaii Five-O and all that junk.

People ask me if I think Broadway audiences are ready for this kind of show. I tell them I don't know. I don't think about that. You just have to do what you want to do; I don't know what the audiences want of what works. West Side Story certainly doesn't look to me like anything that would have worked, and at the time we did it nobody thought it would. Cabaret: certainly the same thing. There was such a sense of "You're not serious! You're going to bring a bunch of Nazis on stage and do that!" Well, we did it. So I'm encouraged that there's an audience for this show.

I know it sounds pretentious, but how do you worry about these kinds of things? The fact is that if we do what we think a Broadway audience wants, and we know what that is--that's Hello, Dolly, Irene--there's certainly a statute of limitations on those. There's got to be. And that kind of old-fashioned musical is not doing as well as it used to. I think if Mame opened today instead of six years ago it wouldn't succeed. I hope I'm right, because I don't like that kind of theater. Who said it all has to be "a pretty girl is like a melody"? That's why we did Follies, to say that's all over.

A certain number of people walk out on every show we do. That will always happen, and that's the life we live. But more of them will stay, to have had a pretty good time. Not as good a time as they would have at Hello, Dolly, but a pretty good time. And as you keep infusing that into the taste of people you are doing what we used to talk about, which is educating your public. Now that's an enormous subject, but it was a hell of a lot more difficult to do three years ago than it is today, and that's because there are young people going to the theater. And there are middle-aged people who only went to off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway for a long, long time because there was nothing on Broadway to interest them. Now they've decided that as a matter of fact there is, because off-Broadway is pretty nearly dead, off-off-Broadway has been killed off, and they're stuck. On Broadway people have learned that there is an audience out there that has shunned them not because of the price of the ticket, though that has been a factor, but primarily because of what they've offered. So we have a more interesting audience coming in now, a wide spectrum. I think anything we do will have walk-outs, but there are enough people waiting to come in to make those shows run. And that's very encouraging.

I lose a fortune often on my shows--I know that sounds cavalier of me. I also lose my option to work, because if I lose too many fortunes for too many people they're not going to give me the money to work. Now I've got to tell you that I don't think I'm very avant-garde, so I'm willing to put their money where my head is because the shows never come off that avant-garde (which could scare investors off). You see, I've spoiled my investors. They've made a lot of money with me for a long, long time and now they're not anymore because the last number of shows have not made much at all. Follies of course didn't make any money--it lost every cent put into it. Company only made 5-10% profit. See what I'm getting at? The loss of Follies far outweighs the gains of shows like Fiddler and Cabaret.

It's self-evident that what's happening to Sondheim and Prince is that if we don't have a hit soon, we really will be labeled awful elitists that don't do anything popular. Then to raise money will be an impossibility, and we won't be able to work with each other. Nobody has really figured it out yet, but we've never really had a hit. We're very good for each other artistically, I think, and we would hate to not be able to work together.

I never enjoyed the business aspects of producing. By producing I was just looking for the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do, which was direct. There are too many frustrations involved in producing. Next to that I don't like the money. It's not that I don't spend money, I just don't like worrying about budgets or any of those things. I also don't like to have to hustle for money, to have to find investors, to have to make them happy, to have to worry about the pressure of them, which I have to worry about all the time. Because if Pacific Overtures doesn't pay back, raising money for the next one is going to be tough.

I want to do musicals because there's more theater in them and they're fun, which in itself can make them very exciting for an audience. I think they should always have something important to say; I can take Pacific Overtures and the last five or six shows I did, less Candide--much less Candide--and tell you that I passionately care about what they had to say. I've done straight plays, too. I loved doing an O'Neill play called The Great God Brown and I loved doing The Visit. As far as I'm concerned the O'Neill play was a musical and The Visit was a musical, in that they are the best kind of theater--theater that has a dynamic. Situation comedies and things like that don't interest me at all. And the whole naturalistic or realistic theater doesn't interest me very much. I don't think theater should ever be realistic. I just think that the power the theater has is in the unreal. Brecht, Meyerhold, Artaud--you can make a list as long as your arm of the people I think served the stage in the right fashion. And that's what musicals ought to do.

What we're talking about in the development of musical theater is competing with other media. The theatre must provide entertainment--"entertainment" is a pejorative; the hell with that! Entertainment!--which is unique and separate from what you get on television and in a movie theatre. That isn't as hard as it sounds, because the relationship between a live actor and the audience is a unique and thrilling thing, and that's what you should be dealing with--plus imagination, which television doesn't invite at all. That's what the future of the theater lies in, and that's all.

Luck is such an incredible factor in directing shows on Broadway. I don't think that working in summer stock helps you one bit in getting ahead in the theater. I don't think you learn a hell of a lot from painting somebody else's scenery. The roar of the greasepaint and all that is fun, sure--so long as you realize that's what you're getting out of it. I think the regional theaters, which are enormously different from summer stock, are very instructive. If I were starting out now I'd take work wherever I could get it, but I'd prefer to work in a regional theatre where there is criticism and professionalism, where you aren't so inured from the realities of the outside world that you're stuck in self-congratulatory situations. And then, unless you get your foothold in a regional theatre, in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or ACT in San Francisco or someplace, you come to New York and you just have to hustle for a job--it's really hard. Certainly the life of the theatre is such now that all of us, anybody with a brain who wants to work, are working everywhere. That's how you see everyone.

This will come as a surprise to you, but I think there aren't all that many ambitious people around with talent. In fact, the only absolutely talented people who have been destroyed by their experience in theater--people with real talent--have been self-destructive. And part of that is because the odds and tensions of working in the theatre seems so terrible, the ambition you need to work is so enormous. But I do not believe that for a person with a certain amount of talent the opportunity to work on Broadway does not arise. Actors are the best example. I have never known an actor with a decent amount of talent who did not end up playing at least a featured role in a Broadway play. This goes for directors, too. Every director who directs a half-way decent production here in Boston, for example, gets a chance to work on Broadway because everybody is looking for directors who did something audacious.

As far as what I'm going to do after this show, Steve has an idea for a musicalization of a bizarre kind of piece that at first didn't interest me at all. Now it does because I got the notion to do it in the same theater and environment that we did Candide. That attracts me a lot, but I can't talk about it much because it's not in P.D. (public domain).

[Sondheim, during a talk at Harvard last week, embellished on this a bit more: "I have an opera in mind--very unexperimental, very straight-forward, very linear--just about people screaming at each other. Lots of blood and horror."]

I hate to say this, but I'm not the enthusiast about the theater I used to be, because it's not providing as much of the kind of theater I'd like to see. But the minute it does, nothing excites me as much as the theatre. On the other hand, I do not go to see everything. I wouldn't dream of it, because there are a whole lot of things I simply know I wouldn't like. But the minute there's an adventure going on I'm there and accessible as hell. Because I really love the theatre, much more than any other medium.

I don't have a clue to how "history" will regard me. I'd like to think that in fifty years somebody will be opening up a book about me, but I don't think so for a minute. That's because communications and media have made the world so enormous and impersonal that there's not much of a chance for people to "make history." You're in the eye for a while and people ask you what you're doing and the next thing you know someone else has taken your place.

I really am stuck with very corny thoughts sometimes. Like, there's no question but that every day when I get up in the midst of this show I say to myself: "You mean you actually get paid for this? People ask you what you think and are nice to you?...All of this for having a good time?"

I don't think theatre should ever be realistic. I just think that the power the theatre has is in the unreal. Brecht, Meyerhold, Artaud-you can make a list as long as your arm of the people I think served the stage in the right fashion. And that's what musicals ought to do.