Feature
Harold Prince Speaks of Happy Endings
By JERRY TALLMER
Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht
(There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight)
— Last verse of “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“Mack the Knife”), added by Brecht for the 1930 German film
Harold Prince and Dreigrosschenoper (Threepenny Opera) were born the same year — 1928 — he in New York City on January 30, the ruthless Brecht/Weill cabaret piece starring Lotte Lenya at the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, Berlin, on August 31, in pre-Hitler Weimar Gemany.
“Look,” says Harold Prince, leaning forward at his desk in Rockefeller Center, “it’s not so complicated. I’m a German Jewish boy whose family came here to New York very early in the 19th Century. When I showed up in Germany in [U.S. Army] uniform [during the Korean War], I felt an instant atavistic connection with German music, German culture.
“Some of my relatives were victims of the Holocaust, others got away to America, but you cannot erase the feeling you have for German theater, German music, the German Zeitgeist. It affects Cabaret and Lovemusik and one movie I did, Something for Everyone [1970], with Angela Lansbury showing how aristocrats deal with Nazism.”
You could take a piece of string and a some pins and triangulate a number of other years and dates into this Weimar-inflected equation: 1939, when Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin was first published in London; November 1951 when I Am a Camera opened on Broadway with Julie Harris as Sally Bowles; March 10, 1954, when The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in an English-language adaptation by Marc Blitzstein, produced and directed by Carmen Capalbo and starring Lotte Lenya, opened at the Theater de Lys (now the Lortel) on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village; November 20, 1966, when Cabaret, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Joe Masteroff, produced and directed by Harold Prince, opened at the Broadhurst on Broadway; and May 3, 2007, when Lovemusik, music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by many, book by Alfred Uhry, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club and directed by Harold Prince, opened at the Biltmore on Broadway.
Beyond all that, way beyond all that, if you punch up HAROLD PRINCE on the Internet Broadway Data Base, you are given the names of 64 other Broadway shows from 1950 to now, including a considerable number of huge hits, that the man either produced or directed or both, or (at the beginning of his career) staged managed or co-produced — none of them, I think, having anything to do with Germany, Weimar or otherwise. As, just for instance, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof, Zorba, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman …
In these five-plus decades the man has also won 21 Tony Awards. A Harold Prince show of some standing that did not win the top Tony was West Side Story in 1958, and Prince has never forgot that — nor did Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, one supposes — just as Prince, in an opposite. affirmative sense, never forgot Chita Rivera, the fiery first Anita of West Side Story who 35 years later would be setting Broadway on fire anew as the high-kicking Spider Woman luring window-dresser, hero-in-spite-of-himself Brent Carver into a final fatal tango.
Nor did a Tony of any sort go to anyone or anything in a Harold Prince show, Lovemusik, that in this very year of 2007 knocked the socks off this very theatergoer for reasons which were inherent way back in a Threepenny Opera review by said theatergoer in Volume I, Number 1 of The Village Voice, October 26, 1955, which as any fool can plainly see was almost 52 years ago.
There are two shows, really, at the Theatre de Lys [the review proposed]. One has a cast of twenty ebullient and engaging actors and actresses … The other show has a cast of one, and her name is Lotte Lenya … Critics are always being advised to stay away from the word electric; I can only say that there is no other word available to me, at this late hour [I mean, we were giving birth to a newspaper], with which to categorize that instant when Miss Lenya shambles front and center exhale the first weary, husky, terrible notes of her husband’s famous song about the Black Freighter — the young on which young Jenny the slavey, whore-to-be, used to sail (in her daydreams) out into the bay, there to train the guns of her ship of her whole damn civilization, and yours, and mine. Her voice lifts and hardens into the reprise (“ … and the blaaaaaack frayta … ”), and suddenly … we are stark up face to face against a kind of world and a kind of half-century that no one born this side of the water can ever quite fully make, or want to make, his own … with the smoke still rising from the crematories and Bert Brecht’s old friend Uncle Joe Stalin just sitting there, waiting, far to the north.
And going on 52 years later, the same theatergoer/critic walks into the Biltmore for Lovemusik and starts shivering all over again as that weary, husky, terrible, seen-it-all, done-it-all voice of Lotte Lenya, or next thing to it within a micro-timbre, comes scorching upon us with “Alabama Song” and “Surabaya Johnny” and, of course, “Mack the Knife,” in German, from the throat of an American actress/singer named Donna Murphy. (I know nothing about the voice of Kurt Weill, the man who heard Lenya in every note he ever put to paper, but an exceptional actor named Michael Cerveris made me think I did.)
“Yes, sure, I saw the De Lys Threepenny and I loved it,” says the Harold Prince who directed Lovemusik for Lynne Meadow’s Manhattan Theatre Club. “Saw the German movie subsequently. The De Lys production opened in March 1954, didn’t it? I should remember. Pajama Game” — directed by Mr. George Abbott, produced by Mr. Abbott’s 26-year-old protégé, Harold S. Prince, dig the S., soon to be dropped — “opened May 13, 1954.”
He had started working for the legendary Mr. Abbott in 1948, fresh from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Liberal Arts. “I have no memory of not being in the theater. I sent him [Abbott] a letter and a script I’d written and said I can work for you for nothing if you can tell from my letter I’m worth it. If not, you can fire me. Television was just coming in. Abbott didn’t enjoy doing it, so I did it. There was something called The Hugh Martin Show. He wrote the first one, I wrote the second. He directed the first one, I directed the second. Then I became a third assistant stage manager on [the Broadway revues] Touch and Go and Tickets, Please! and then I cast Call Me Madam, all but Ethel Merman and Paul Lucas, I’d never before cast anything in my life.”
It was T. Edward Hambleton of the Phoenix Theater, a high-flown serious-minded repertory company of the 1950s, who called Prince one day and said: “How’d you like to be a director?” The show was a New York State Council of the Arts touring company of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker — “and I grabbed it, sent it off around the state with Sada Thompson and … who’s that great old actress? … Sylvia Sidney. It got such good reviews that [David] Merrick hired me for what ultimately became Hello, Dolly!” (sans Prince).
The walls of his office are lined with billboards of all or most of his shows over the years, starting with a Peter Arno poster for The Pajama Game. “No one knows who Peter Arno was any longer,” Prince says dryly — Arno, the risqué, Sophisticated New Yorker cartoonist who specialized in bosomy beauties. “I have the original of that drawing on my wall at home. I also have a Helen Hokinson; nobody remembers who she was either.”
Lovemusik, he says, will close at the end of its pre-announced 10-week run, despite full houses as we talk. “We’ll soon use up the MTC audience — in this case, people in their 50s, Jewish, Upper West Side; very much the audience that I’d made a career of. Now that audience is replaced by an audience that will go, yes, to Phantom, but not to a lot of other things I did. With Lovemusik, it would cost $3.5 million to move [theaters], and that would be to this wholly different audience. The Broadway mainstream audience now is very hard to figure out … but I don’t know if it’s worth figuring out. There’s an audience that goes regularly [to hits], and an audience that goes selectively … ”
And then he starts talking about his grandmother.
“She was Beatrice Stern, born in El Paso, Texas, my mother’s mother, and when I was 5 years old she took me to see Rigoletto and when I was 8 [he would have had to have been 9 actually] I saw the Orson Welles Mercury Theater Julius Caesar.”
Well, said this other native New Yorker, my grandmother, Helen Kohut Lowenthal, who thought she was Queen Marie of Rumania, would tell me — act out — the entire story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, beginning to end, and she or perhaps it was my mother who took me to see Eva Le Gallienne in Rostand’s L’Aiglon when I was 15, and when I was 16 I went with my whole school class to see Orson Welles do Julius Caesar in blackshirts as a metaphor on Fascism, and can still vividly recall it to this day. Remember the mob closing in on the timid little guy as he squeaks: “I’m Cinna the poet, not Cinna the conspirator”?
“There you are,” said Harold Prince. “You and I have very similar backgrounds.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to Cabaret. How did Cabaret come to be?
“It was brought to me by various people. Gwen [Verdon] wanted to do it. Everybody saw it as a show about a girl dancing on a table in a nightclub, but I saw it in terms of the Joel Grey character, an entertainer along the lines of the guy in the John Osborne play — a bad-taste little guy who in Cabaret will through circumstances turn into a Nazi. Which, by the way, is the exact opposite of the movie or the [Sam Mendes 2004] revival which had him as victim of the Nazis.
“I used to hang out in a bar in Stuttgart,” said ex-U.S. Army of Occupation officer Harold Prince. “A place called Maxim’s.
There was a little man there who told jokes and sang and danced — all badly — while three bovine girls danced behind him. So my two years in the Army were worth a lot to me. I came back and had a lot of career before I got around to Cabaret.”
After burying the image of the girl dancing on the nightclub table as too predictable, Prince “introduced everybody [Kander, Ebb, et al.] to Joel Grey, and we splintered the shape of the show.” Result: to my mind the single most penetrating musical in the history of the Broadway stage.
Prince looks on Lovemusik as “another attempt to reexamine the structure of the musical. We tell the story” — the Weil/Lenya story — “chronologically, but the music’s from all over the place. There’s certain work you do in this country that resonates more in other countries. Already, on Lovemusik, we’re hearing from Tokyo, Berlin, London, Buenos Aires, Israel. And we will do it in those places, and I’ll direct some of those places.”
Meanwhile he’s been working with playwright Richard Nelson on “a new joyous musical” tentatively titled Paradise Lost and based on the Joseph Roth novel, The Tale of the 1002nd Night, about a Shah of Shahs who goes to Vienna in search of the ultimate sexual stimulation. And gets hornswaggled, into the bargain.
Yes, Harold Prince has a family — very much so. Son Charles is a conductor, daughter Daisy is a director. Judy Prince, their mother, his wife, is herself the daughter of the late Saul Chaplin, the immensely prolific Hollywood composer-conductor-producer whom a young Harold Prince was taken to meet when Judy was a girl of 15. [One of Chaplin’s dozens of film awards would in 1962 be for the sound track of West Side Story.] “But Judy and I didn’t meet then, we met years later in Paris.”
He hasn’t much truck for “the good old days,” he told a graduating class at Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) College this past May, “because, in truth, they weren’t. But these surely are not the good new ones.” At least, once upon a time, people had something better to do than “blogging each other on the Internet.”
He got up from his desk to go off to lunch. “We’re in a great big hole now,” he said of the state of the nation and of the world. “Will we ever climb out of it? Well, being in theater, you know we’ll certainly climb out of it.” Two beats. “And fall into an even deeper hole.”
Brecht and Weill wrote a show about that. They called it “Happy End.”
