A Real Prince

In the mid-70s, though he was still fairly young, the great Broadway producer and director Harold Prince wrote a memoir.  It hasn't been available for a long time, but now it's back, and updated, in A Sense Of Occasion. He actually reprints the original, with new notes at the end of each chapter, and then takes up where he left off.

It's hard to imagine the Broadway musical since World War II without Harold Prince.  He's been involved, as producer and/or director, in numerous shows, including The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Fiddler On The Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Evita and The Phantom Of The Opera.

Prince, almost 90, is still working.  His entire story is yet to be written, but it's fun to find out his point of view.  When you read the memoir of a songwriter or playwright, you hear about the struggle to create.  Prince has that, to a degree, but the producer in him never fully goes away, and he often discusses the fiscal negotiations behind his shows.

If there's a problem with the book, he's simply got too many productions and can't discuss them all fully.  As it is, he tends to be terse.  Perhaps it's the training he got in theatre, where you cut anything you must to keep the story moving.

But most of Prince's productions, even the biggest, only get a handful of pages, when they deserve--and readers want--20 or 30 pages.  And not just for the big hits, but also for some of the interesting failures, such as She Loves Me, It's A Bird...It's A Plane...It's Superman and Merrily We Roll Along.

It may sound like such a book would be too long, but A Sense Of Occasion has less than 300 pages of text.  I think we could manage something twice that.