Harold Prince Quotes

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Harold Prince

Profession : Producer

Birth : January 30, 1928

Collaboration is just, really, a group of people getting in a room with their eye on a very similar prize and wanting to come out with the same show. The director, ultimately, is the guy in front of whom the buck stops. So, he has to have the courage to prevail. But, he has got to have a huge amount of respect for his collaborators.

Harold Prince

Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.

Harold Prince

You think, 'Musicals, they must always be romantic' - You'd be surprised how few of them historically have ever been romantic.

Harold Prince

You could argue that 'Sweeney Todd' was romantic, if you looked closely at it, but it didn't impart that to its audiences. But it's large, and it's melodramatic, and it's a style I like to work in periodically.

Harold Prince

'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.

Harold Prince

The truth of the matter is that I have lasted a long time, and with it comes both good and bad things. One of the good things is that no one can ever take my career away from me. No one can ever say, 'You can't be in the theater any more.'

Harold Prince

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

Harold Prince

I don't know why the guys with the big money don't find five terrific young producers and give each of them enough to commission a musical and to live on for a year. You'd be likely to get at least one project with a future.

Harold Prince

When I was a 25-year-old kid, I raised $260,000 for my first show, 'The Pajama Game,' in such a homemade, pathetic, endearing way - a buck here, a buck there.

Harold Prince

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

Harold Prince

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.

Harold Prince

Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.

Harold Prince

I really wish people - maybe it's naive - wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.

Harold Prince

The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.

Harold Prince

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.

Harold Prince

Most of the big money people don't know what would interest an audience if you did it. They only know what interested the audience last time.

Harold Prince

I wouldn't be here if it weren't for 'Show Boat.' The kind of theater I chose to be involved in is completely a direct reflection of what 'Show Boat' made possible.

Harold Prince

When I started producing, it was George Abbott directing and he would let me do the scenery. He just wanted to know where the doors were - the entrances, the exits; the tables, the props - and then I would hire the designer. I took charge of the visuals - scenery and costumes and so on. And, the shows looked wonderful.

Harold Prince

I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?

Harold Prince

Audiences are quite happy to be astonished, and they don't care who does that astonishing.

Harold Prince