Thursday evening, a native New Yorker named Harold Prince will attend the opening night of his 46th Broadway show — a mere 63 years after the debut of his maiden effort as a producer, “The Pajama Game.” Prince is the co-director of “Prince of Broadway,” a plotless compendium of numbers chosen from the 46 productions he has mounted over the course of an astounding career spanning seven decades.
It’s a Broadway’s-greatest-hits album come to life, from “Show Boat” to “West Side Story” to “Fiddler on the Roof” to “Cabaret” to “Company” to “Follies” to “Sweeney Todd” to “Evita” to “Phantom of the Opera,” with wildly talented performers who swing for the fences with every song and dance.
But “Prince of Broadway” is also something more. It’s a plangent reminder of a time when New York was the cultural center of the country in which Broadway functioned as the nucleus — the source of glamor and style and the wellspring of the talent that would turn American pop culture into a world-changing force.
Most great Hollywood actors from the 1930s to the 1980s rose from Broadway. Practically every memorable tune from the American songbook was written by someone who had made his or her bones writing for the theater. Fashions were set by Broadway costuming.
What was key about Broadway was the role it played in establishing mainstream cultural taste — not too high to be forbiddingly avant-garde but in no way low, cheap or disreputable.
Prince did not write or choreograph any of the material on display in “Prince of Broadway.” Some of the shows highlighted are ones he produced, meaning that he raised the money and served as the production’s CEO. Some are from shows he directed, meaning that he had creative control.
What this means is “Prince of Broadway” is a record of Prince’s tastes — and his determination to present productions of the highest quality. His best shows were not only marked by the brilliance of their creative material (as in his long and fruitful collaboration with Stephen Sondheim) but by the jaw-dropping quality of the legendary sets for “Company” and “Sweeney Todd” and the no-cost-spared showmanship of “Follies” and “Phantom.”
The brilliance on display in “Prince of Broadway” made it clear to me how we no longer look to the top talent in our cultural life for examples of taste. We look to them for thrills and excitement, to get our pulses racing and grab our eyeballs, which is an entirely different thing.
“Prince of Broadway” also recalls a sadly long-gone era when the most talented people in entertainment were dedicated to the making of popular art of appeal not to teenage boys but to grown men and women. Broadway was entertainment for adults. Kids could attend, but the fare was not aimed at them.
During the first act, a narrator who plays Prince reports on the reception of his 1965 musical “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!” The narrator says the show got the best reviews of Prince’s career. Prince called the box office the morning after opening night to find that not a single ticket had been sold.
Why did it close after just 129 performances? Prince doesn’t say, but I will: Grown-up ticket buyers in 1965 didn’t want to see a musical about a comic-book character, even if it was great. Because they were grown-ups.
Now flash forward 40 years. If the notoriously injurious “Spider-Man” musical had even been minimally watchable, it would today be rivaling “Wicked” for ticket sales. And the basis of the extraordinary success of “Wicked” — which will likely become the highest-grossing theatrical presentation in history over the next decade — is not that it wows adult audiences but that it is catnip for girls under the age of 18.
The thing about good entertainment for adults is that it does not exclude the young — rather, it can show the young that there are wonders into which they can grow and that will help them to grow. “Prince of Broadway” doesn’t have a plot, but it has a story — a story about a go-getting striver whose relentless striving provided the rest of us with glories untold.
It is, like the best of America, aspirational.