Hal Prince's Flops

Posted: 11/16/09 at 10:09am

When I think of my favorite Broadway directors four names aren't all that original - Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Hal Prince.

But out of all of these, the only one who really had a string of flops (at least once they became big hit directors) was Hal Prince. Part of the reason might be that he's also the most prolific...

I was wondering what people thought of his flops. If anything was worth salvaging, what drew him to the projects, etc.

While it's open for discussion, I personally don't mean shows like Pacific Overtures which are now largely seen as creative successes. Merrily We Roll Along's failure has like wise been discussed a lot.

I'm more interested to hear why he decided to do Roza, for instance, or if there are any secret fans here of Doll's Life. While he had some flops, particularly with plays before that (remember Some of My Best Friends? Me neither) I guess I am especially interested in the period Merrily we Roll Along and Phantom where he seemed momentarily doomed.

You have the musicals A Doll's Life, Grind and Roza. Add to that if you want the flop plays Play Memory and End of the World. Even the Cabaret revival that led into Phantom didn't play as long as expected.

With Bennett, while he did far less work, when he finally had a big flop with Ballroom, it's more or less easy to see why he did the show, why it flopped, etc. Even with Fosse and Big Deal, you can *get* it--but I admit the draw these shows had for Prince kinda baffles me.
Updated On: 11/16/09 at 10:09 AM

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 10:42am

Eric:

You might wish to read his book in which he discusses these shows.

I thought all the shows you mentioned were bad. The musicals "A Doll's Life," "Roza," and "Grind" may have sounded like good ideas on paper, but they failed when put on the stage. I thought the score for "A Doll's Life" had a few excellent songs, however. As for Prince's staging of these musicals, they all suffered from a certain heavy-handedness.

As for the plays, "Some of My Best Friends" was terrible, and "Play Memory" and "End of the World" just not good. You can add "Hollywood Arms" to this list, though it was better than the other three.
Updated On: 11/16/09 at 10:42 AM

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 11:58am

I'm actually quite fond of Grind and would love for someone to try it again. It's been a while since I've listened to Roza but I recall liking it well enough. I've struggled through Doll's Life a few times. Maybe it's time to give it another go.

I can see why all 3 flopped. I think the 80's played a huge part in all 3 bombing.

Poor Larry Grossman. Every musical he did on Broadway was a flop (Minnie's Boys, Goodtime Charley, Doll's Life, Grind). His only musical that's done often is Snoopy! (which I actually prefer to Charlie Brown). Kudos to Prince for using him though. He's a fantastic composer. He also did incidental music for "Play Memory". Poor guy. He and Karen Morrow both never had a Broadway success.

[Ed_Mottershead]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 12:22pm

I saw Roza and rather liked it -- Georgia Brown was really fantastic. One of the posters indicated something to the effect of relistening to it recently. I'm sure it never had a commerical recording -- is there a demo or something like that?

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 1:33pm

BobbyBubby:

"Grind" was done two years ago in the Musicals in Mufti series at the York Theatre. It seemed to me no better than the first time.

It was part of a series devoted to the works of Larry Grossman.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 2:19pm

Some of My Best Friends; Good God, I was at the opening because a friend was a production assistant on it. She said it read a lot better than it played. Some plays are like that. I told someone who had a little money it it that it was the kind of show that would close on Sunday and the following day the business would wake up and not even remember it. It was the sort of flop that no one would get professionally hurt.

I do remember poor Ted Knight smiling to beat the band at the final curtain call, but with the most gritted teeth I have ever seen on stage. Poor guy. His jaw probably went into spasm.

It was an expensive show too. There were a lot of roles and the actors playing them didn't come cheap.

End of the World (With Symposium to Follow) which was the full title, at least had Linda Hunt fresh off her Oscar win in a funny performance. Note: there were audience members who stayed in their seats after the show waiting for the symposium which never existed.

Play Memory was not bad, but it wasn't any good either. There was no imperative about it. It was a late season entry that somebody scraped together the money to bring it in from a regional run in Princeton. The woman who was Tony nominated (name?) died tragically within a few years in a car crash.

Grind was a great, big over-amplified, over-designed show with a familiar script and songs that the sound system homogenized. It didn't come together. Talented people on stage though.

Roza was fun, but there wasn't anything that 'had to be seen' in it.

[Biff AKA Levi]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 2:33pm

If a play is better read than staged, is it still a play?

[Scripps2]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 2:38pm

"I'm sure it never had a commerical recording -- is there a demo or something like that?"

I'd be interested to know if there was a recording of Roza too.

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 2:44pm

A play need to even be produced to be a play.

There's only a soundboard of Roza.

Posted: 11/16/09 at 10:34pm

Youtube has an amusing tv commercial for Roza. I know one book called the score "europop" which has always made me wanna hear it-- It sounds like an interesting script that maybe got too preachy with its message near the end?

I agree with the poor Grossman sentiment--I think he has talent (maybe partly as I grew up with the animated Snoopy The Musical, a score I MUCH prefer to YAGMCB). I even liked his fairly recent song for the direct to DVD mess Pocahontas 2 (but it seems Disney has started hiring Tesori to crank out their tunes for such projects rather than him--though I guess thankfully they quit that line of projects altogether).

I'll have to track down Doll's Life and Grind recordings--if they're easy-ish to find. Doll's Life at least LOOKS gorgeous in the pics I've seen--Grind looks kinda like a mess (one muddled in my mind with Big Deal though I've managed to "see" Big Deal and at least enjoyed large chunks of that).

I guess my original question was what made Hal choose these plays? Was he just floundering post Sondheim? I wonder if he kicked himself after all for not doing Cats (not that a Prince Cats would make any sense to me).

Some of My Best Friends had no relation to the gay cult classic 1971 film does it? (That film was set in a gay bar on Christmas Eve I suppose--it's even more of an "angry tragic gay" picture than Boys in the Band and has a wonderful Rue McClanahan performance lol)

[PalJoey]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 11:04pm

I had worshiped and idolized the Hal Prince of my teenage years: Company, Follies and A Little Night Music were the directorial trifecta.

Then he did Doll's Life and Grind and the movie of A Little Night Music, each one more wretched, ugly and unwatchable.

I found Sweeney overproduced and Pacific Overtures uninvolving. I wondered what had happened to the genius I had idolized.

Then he did Merrily We Roll Along, on which his direction was sloppy and amateurish, misguided and poorly conceived.

I was never a fan of Phantom but it worked like gangbusters, so I suppose it was well-directed.

I often wonder if the genius of Hal Prince was more about his collaborations with Michael Bennett and Boris Aronson.

Posted: 11/16/09 at 11:25pm

What did you think of Cabaret (original or revival) Zorba, or later Spider Woman? Or his first film, Something for Everyone (which I think is better directed than ALNM movie though the direction is the weakest element of a great Kander score, great Wheeler script and a great cast--then again I'm an ALNM movie defender, so...)

I do think Prince's production for Phantom is the best thing about Phantom, though I haven't seen it in ages (and probably won't in ages) so...

Merrily definitely suffered from the get go with its concept (I still find it weird how Sondheim, Furth and Prince seemed to think they were making a supremely youthful, hopeful and optimistic show not realizing just how depressing the material was).

However, finally seeing a high quality of the Prince televised production of Pacific Overtures, and not just the fuzzy bootleg, I do think the staging is genius. A big chunk of this is Aronson's amazing designs, of course...

I do agree that Prince has never found someone he meshed with as well as Aronson (it's too bad too, that we didn't get mor work with Bennett but of course that worked out fine for Bennett--though I do think Ron Field's work on Cabaret is exquisite (firing Field from Merrily seemed to be a mistake as fromall I've read, his work wasn't part of the problem)

[PalJoey]

Posted: 11/16/09 at 11:43pm

Everything about Merrily was a mistake, starting with taking a play whose backward structure never worked and turning it into a musical whose backward structure will never work. The firing of Ron Field was just a matter of "The show's not working...I know: we'll fire the [fill in the blank]!"

Pacific Overtures was indeed dazzling. The word I used was uninvolving.

I never saw the original Cabaret or Zorba, but I saw the Cabaret revival, and it was a museum-piece reproductions, without any of the magic the original must have had.

I saw Spider Woman in its tryout at Purchase and it was another Hal Prince mess. By the time it got to Broadway, he had cleaned it up. But nothing since had the brilliance of the three in that trifecta.

Posted: 11/16/09 at 11:50pm

I find Pacific Overtures very involving--but I think that's largely because before I saw a good copy of it (ie one that didn't give me a headache after 20 minutes of watching) i had had 15 years to fall in love with the score, read the script, etc. I have no idea what I would have thought seeing it live back when.

I've also managed to "see" the Cabaret revival and I admit it's mainly interesting to me for the museum piece qualities--to see even a watered down recreation of that iconic staging is exciting enough for me as a theatre geek. So it's hardly an accurate way for me to judge it.

I actually had assumed that Prince wasn't involved in Kiss before Livent and crew got their hands on it and largely re-conceived it. It sounds like he really had the wrong concept for it. But I did see his final production on tour with Chita and was pretty blown away (though I was 13 at the time and it was maybe the fourth major show I had seen in my life--after Phantom, Miz and Grand Hotel which I think was an even more stunning production with far lesser material).

The only other two Prince shows I saw were Show Boat, the Vancouver Livent staging (which I thought was as near perfect as I could want a Show Boat to be--though once again I have to emphasize I was pretty young and "new" to seeing big live productions) and the slightly scaled down tour of Parade he did which I found an often striking production but somewhat uninvolving--something I have chalked up more to my reaction to the score and book but maybe Prince is to blame as well.

Sorry PJ if it sounds like I'm arguing your points--I'm not, I just find your opinion on this fascinating and wonder if I agree or not that it really depends on his collaborators.

I do find it interesting that in as much as one can see a clear progression from his early concept musicals--Cabaret and Zorba and then after Zorba it's almost like he kept Aronson and some of his ideas for shows, but replaced Kander and Ebb with Sondheim and Field with Bennett (probably wisely although I think all three's work on Cabaret and Zorba were wonderful)

OH I also saw the anniversary tour of Evita which he remounted himself--and I found the staging spectacular, though it almost eclipsed the so so cast I saw.
Updated On: 11/16/09 at 11:50 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 12:12am

There was nothing particularly wrong about Show Boat, but it was just Show Boat, and it was long, and there was nothing particularly wrong with it.

Evita was pretty perfect.

Posted: 11/17/09 at 12:20am

I actually think the changes he made to Show Boat's scripts and elements he took from various productions were close to ingenious--but it may have helped that I was in a production around the time that used the lumbering 1940s revival script just before.

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 12:24am

I give Stroman a lot of credit for making that Show Boat so thrilling.

I think the revival of Pacific Overtures showed the weakness of the show. I've seen tape of the original and Prince's grander conception worked better (though not perfect either).

Pacific Overtures always reads better on the page than it comes across on stage.

[sabrelady]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 12:24am

Eric I think Doll's Life is realatively easy to obtain. I certainly have a copy I got a couple of yrs ago @ Footlights.

Posted: 11/17/09 at 1:07am

Pacific Overtures might work better on the page--but I still like it best on CD. I think the score is just gorgeous.

You're right Stroman did great work with Showboat (the best I've seen her done IMHO--maybe her teaming up to co direct Hal's new show is a good thing) but Hal deserves credit for--and he was largely the one behind many of the changes in the script too

[devonian.t]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 8:01am

I saw Kiss of the Spiderwoman 4 times in London. I consider it to be one of Prince's best works- up there with Evita.

Maybe his high flop rate is to do with taking a gamble- willing to risk being wrong. What he did with Evita and Phantom really took questionable material and created credible, even masterful, theatre. Maybe he was trying that with the likes of Roza but just didn't quite get there.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 10:13am

Beginning in the 70s, I feel Prince was moving toward an operatic approach to musicals. Certainly Night Music, Candide, Pacific Overtures, 20th Century and Sweeney Todd are operatic or at least operetta-ish in scope. In my minority opinion, both Evita and Phantom are weak shows dressed up with an over-the-top operatic staging by Prince.

This actually dates back to She Loves Me (a perfectly constructed operetta-musical) and the basic story of Zorba. While executed as a concept musical, Zorba's plot (or lack thereof) if reduced to a libretto synopsis could be a workable one for an opera, and probably a better end product than the Zorba we have.

Grind was staged and produced like an opera but is strictly musical theatre.

The only Prince musical (as opposed to operatic) staging that has worked for me in years is Kiss of the Spider Woman.

I'd love to see Prince get a hold of the opera war horse rep staples like Butterfly, Tosca, Traviata or Turandot and see what he would do.

[GoSmileLaughCryClap]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 10:19am

Prince directed a very successful production of Turandot for the Vienna State Opera in the early 80s.
Updated On: 11/17/09 at 10:19 AM

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 10:37am

Eric:

"Some of My Best Friends" was a fantasy.

WOSQ:

Prince staged "Faust" at the Met, and I thought it was awful.

Posted: 11/17/09 at 10:38am

WOSQ--interesting theory. It would explain why (Kiss, and arguably Show Boat aside) he has stepped away from dance (his early shows being quite dance heavy)--although of course many classic operas do have ballet elements.

I'll ignore your comments about Zorba just because I have a soft spot for it and have loved everything I've seen and read of the Prince production (which was dance heavy--and had awesome Aronson designs), but I think your description is right and, along with the designers, I agree with you re Evita and Phantom.

While I think I what you mean--would you care to explain what for you is the difference between opera/operetta and musical theatre staging?

It's interesting that in some ways Sondheim has moved into more of an opera (or chamber opera) element post Prince(again far less dance, etc) yet when they teamed back up together, for Bounce, Prince seemed to be trying hard to do a classic musical comedy, which didn't work.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 11/17/09 at 4:19pm

I have always said (somewhat simplistically) that a musical has more plot than opera, that opera is basically character and death. Not all, the comic operas certainly have far fewer deaths, but there is a dearth of happenings and some serious tragedy in opera. (Mimi enters, falls in love, coughs and dies.)

Even Sweeney Todd spends its first act telling us what has already happened and what the characters want to do and also explaining relationships so that Act Two just roars through events. It does this quite wonderfully.

Zorba's plot in broad strokes is that he befriends a young man who falls in love with a widow while Zorba woos his courtesan. The widow is killed, the courtesan dies, Zorba and the young man dance--that's IT.

Sondheim described Passion as a 'rhapsody', but I really don't know what that means or for that matter, what Passion was beyond a misfire. Just because a work is through-sung does not make it an opera.

If musical theatre is larger-than-life, then opera is "larger than larger-than-life". There is a hyper-passionate sweep to it that musical theatre with its plot digressions cannot be bothered with. That sweeping combination of emotions with music to match is one of opera's great attractions for me. And also for me a good if not great tragic opera has to have some level of silly non-reality to it. Even Traviata with consumption can still hit those high notes in the last act.

Follies is operatic in concept (What really happens?), but mostly musical theatre. Pacific Overtures is more operatic to me.

Operetta is fluffier, lighter, but still requires real legit singing. It is almost always comic. Ironic at the most dark.

For me opera vs operetta vs musical theatre is similar to that famous definition of pornography: I know it when I see it.

Of course, I can be just as full of sh!t as the next person.