NEW YORK -- Harold Prince, a Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musical theater with such groundbreaking shows as The Phantom of the Opera, Cabaret, Company and Sweeney Todd, and who won 21 Tony Awards, has died. Prince was 91.
Publicist Rick Miramontez said Prince died Wednesday after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Prince was known for his fluid, cinematic director's touch, and was unpredictable and uncompromising in his choice of stage material. He often picked challenging, offbeat subjects to musicalize, such as a murderous, knife-wielding barber who baked his victims in pies or the 19th-century opening of Japan to the West.
Along the way, he helped create some of Broadway's most enduring musical hits, first as a producer of such shows as The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone Wednesday, said it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to Broadway. "All of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him," he said.
In addition to Lloyd Webber, Prince -- known by friends as Hal -- worked with some of the best-known composers and lyricists, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and Stephen Sondheim.
"I don't do a lot of analyzing of why I do something," Prince once told The Associated Press. "It's all instinct."
During his more than 50-year career, Prince received a record 21 Tony Awards, including two special Tonys. He also was a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor.
Born in New York on Jan. 30, 1928, Prince was the son of affluent parents, for whom Saturday matinees in the theater with their children were a regular occurrence.
Some of his first stabs at producing included The Pajama Game, starring John Raitt and Janis Paige, and another musical smash Damn Yankees, featuring Gwen Verdon as the seductive Lola.
In 1957, Prince did West Side Story, a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet, told against the backdrop of New York gang warfare. Its success was dwarfed by Fiddler on the Roof, which Prince produced in 1964.
Kander provided the music for one of Prince's biggest successes, Cabaret, which established Prince as a director of first rank.
Prince is survived by his wife of 56 years, Judy; his daughter, Daisy; his son, Charles; and his grandchildren, Phoebe, Lucy, and Felix.
Metro on 08/01/2019