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Creator
Prince, Harold, 1928-2019
Call number
*T-Mss 1986-006
Physical description
119.39 linear feet (363 boxes, 3 oversize folders). 50 audio recordings. 4 moving image recordings
Language
English
Preferred Citation
Harold Prince papers, *T-Mss 1986-006. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Repository
Billy Rose Theatre Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.Restrictions apply
Portions of this collection have been digitized and are available online.

Harold Prince (1928-2019) was a Tony Award-winning American theatre director and producer who began working on Broadway in the 1950s. He worked on productions including West Side Story (1957), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), A Little Night Music (1973), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). The collection, dated from 1915 to 2016, chronicles Prince's professional life via business records, subject files, ledgers, contracts, professional and personal correspondence, scripts and drafts, photographs, programs, publicity materials, awards, costume sketches, set designs, lighting plots, and scrapbooks.

Biographical/historical information

Harold Prince was an American director and producer, primarily of musicals, but also of plays, operas and, occasionally, films. His Broadway career, which began in the 1950s and continued until his death, earned him twenty-one Tony Awards, more than any other individual.

Harold Prince was born in New York City on January 28th, 1928, to an upper-middle class family. As a child he regularly attended the theater. At age sixteen, he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a standard liberal arts curriculum and read and wrote plays in his spare time. He graduated at age nineteen and returned to New York, where he came to the notice of the legendary musical comedy director and producer, George Abbott. Prince submitted a play to Abbott's office and, at age twenty, found himself working there as a general assistant and later as Production Stage Manager. During his early years with Abbott, he made valuable connections with Robert Griffith, who would later become his producing partner, and Ruth Mitchell, who would be his lifetime assistant and production supervisor.

After spending two years stationed in Germany with the United States Army, Prince returned to the Abbott office to work on the original production of Wonderful Town (1953) and to launch his career, with Robert Griffith as a producer, under Abbott's patronage. In their first project, The Pajama Game (1954), Griffith and Prince scored a huge success and introduced to Broadway a new song-writing team, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and a new choreographer, Bob Fosse. Over the course of the next several years, Griffith and Prince, sometimes with Frederick Brisson, produced such shows as Damn Yankees (1955), New Girl in Town (1957), West Side Story (1957), Fiorello (1959), Tenderloin (1960), and A Call On Kuprin (1961).

Soon after the death of Robert Griffith in 1961, Prince moved on to directing when he was called to Philadelphia to fix A Family Affair (1962) during its out of town tryout. For the next few years he continued to produce shows, often directed by Abbot, which would establish his relationships with some of the principal collaborators of his career, such as Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and John Kander and Fred Ebb. During this period Prince also directed such productions as She Loves Me (1963), Baker Street (1965), and It's A Bird... It's A Plane... It's Superman (1966). After producing the critical and commercial megahit, Fiddler on the Roof (1964), success as a serious director came with Kander and Ebb's Cabaret (1966). This show has been heralded as a landmark in the history of musical theater, paving the way for the new generation of thought-provoking, serious musicals, with which Prince's named would be constantly associated.

Starting in 1970, Prince and Sondheim began collaborating more frequently, producing a series of musicals that covered a wide range of subjects and styles: Company (1970), with a book by George Furth; Follies (1971), with a book by James Goldman and co-directed with renowned choreographer Michael Bennett; A Little Night Music (1973) with a book by Hugh Wheeler; Pacific Overtures (1976) with a book by John Weidman; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), with a book by Wheeler; and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), with a book by Furth.

During this period of intense collaboration with Sondheim, Prince also directed other original musicals, including On the Twentieth Century (1978) with Cy Coleman, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Evita (1979); revivals of Leonard Bernstein's Candide (1974); and straight plays, such as Frederich Dürrenmatt's The Visit (1973).

During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Prince re-united with some former collaborators and formed ties with many new ones. He directed two shows with scores by composer Larry Grossman: A Doll's Life (1982), with book and lyrics by Comden and Green; and Grind (1985), with lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh and book by Fay Kanin. Other original musicals Prince directed include Gilbert Becaud and Julian More's Roza (1987); Andrew Lloyds Webber's blockbuster, The Phantom Of the Opera (1988); Kander and Ebb's Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1993); and Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry's Parade (1998). Prince also directed a major revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat in 1994. In 2003, Prince directed Sondheim and Weidman's Bounce, which was produced in Chicago and Washington D.C. In 2007, he directed the Broadway production, Lovemusik, a musical biography of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Paradise Found opened in London in May 2010.

In addition to musicals and plays, Prince has also directed operas and two feature films, and appeared in many documentaries and tributes. In 1974 he published an autobiography, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre.

Prince married Judy Chaplin, the daughter of composer Saul Chaplin, in 1962. Together they had two children, director Daisy Prince and conductor Charlie Prince. Prince died in Iceland on July 31, 2019.

Scope and arrangement

The Harold Prince papers (1915-2016) consist of administrative materials, production materials, and a small amount of personal papers.

Administrative Files illustrate the day-to-day operations of Prince's production office, and consist of subject files maintained by the Prince office over two different time spans. Dated from 1955 to 1987, these files include correspondence, script submissions, programs, legal and financial documents and reports and publicity materials.

Production Files (1954-1999) contain detailed information on virtually all of Prince's shows from The Pajama Game (1954) to Parade (1999), as well as film projects. Materials include scripts, casting notes, publicity materials, reviews, cue logs, and financial documents.

Materials related to Prince's involvement in an administrative and/or artistic capacity with the National Opera Institute (later known as the National Institute for Music Theatre), and the Phoenix Theatre are held in Series III: Other Organizations. Dated from 1972 to 1987, materials include correspondence, financial records, internship applications, clippings, reports on trustees meetings and publicity materials.

Personal Files are dated from 1962 to 1981 and include drafts, galleys, correspondence, and publicity materials pertaining to Prince's autobiography, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre. Personal correspondence, photographs, and other personal ephemera are also present.

The Harold Prince papers are arranged in four series:

  • Series I: Administrative Files
    1955-1987
    13.96 linear feet (34 boxes)

    Series I: Administrative Files consist of general correspondence and subject files documenting the interactions of the Prince office with theatre companies, agents, writers, actors and directors and general business not pertaining to specific productions. These materials cover all aspects of how a multi-million dollar production company started out: what organizations and individuals they corresponded with, how they handled contractual negotiations, investments, profits and losses and which records they considered important enough to retain. The files cover the years he was in partnership with Robert Griffith, from 1955-1961, and the years after Griffith's death.

    Two groups of separated general correspondence files are also present. Correspondents include George Abbott, Carol Burnett, Hermione Gingold, Angela Lansbury, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephan Sondheim, and Elizabeth Swados. Prince also correspondended with theatres and organizations including the American Music Theater Festival, the Goodman Theatre, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Series II: Production Files
    1954-1999
    76.83 linear feet (281 boxes). 39 audio recordings. 4 moving image recordings

    Series II contains materials pertaining to theatrical productions directed and/or produced by Harold Prince from the 1950s-1980s, and covers all aspects of production, including creative, technical and financial. Additionally, the series includes files of shows for which he acted as an official or unofficial advisor, and files for proposed works which never came to fruition. Some of these unrealized projects include work by Prince's most frequent collaborators, such as Stephen Sondheim, Bock and Harnick, and Kander and Ebb. This series also contains materials related to some of Prince's film projects including A Little Night Music and Something for Everyone.

    The production files typically detail the business aspect of productions, rather than the artistic aspects. Some files deal with the creative process of directing and producing a musical. Materials include scripts, scrapbooks of correspondence, programs and publicity materials, photographs, stage manager's calendars, cue logs, set and costume designs, financial records, bills, payrolls and royalty statements, production and casting notes, headshots and resumes, business correspondence, contracts and legal negotiations with the Actors' and Musicians' unions, and publicity materials including clippings, reviews, and press releases.

    Series II also includes audio/visual materials, including sound recording of demos, backers' auditions, rehearsals, live performances (some of foreign productions) and advertising spots. Shows that have sound recordings include Ashmendai, Diamonds, A Doll's Life, Evita, Grind, A Little Night Music, Roza, Side by Side by Sondheim and Sweeney Todd.

    Also included are film reels of publicity spots from the film version of A Little Night Music.

  • Series III: Other Organizations
    1972-1987
    2.92 linear feet (9 boxes)

    This series consists of files concerning two organizations for which Prince served as an artistic administrator. Prince served as Chairman of the National Institute for Music Theatre, which was established in 1969, (then called the National Opera Institute) as a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the support and advancement of opera, operetta, American musicals, and related experimental works.

    Prince served as Artistic Director of the Phoenix Theatre, founded by Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton in 1953 to provide theatre of high quality that would attract both artist and theatergoer, and would be available at reasonable prices. Materials pertaining to specific Phoenix Theatre productions, such as The Visit, can also be found in Production Files.

  • Series IV: Personal Files
    1915-2016
    6.09 linear feet (39 boxes, 3 oversize folders). 20 moving image recordings

    Personal files include materials dealing with honors and awards given to Prince, his travels, his family and civic matters in which he took an interest and his 1974 autobiography, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre. Materials include personal correspondence, manuscript drafts and galleys, award certificates, photographs, and publicity materials.

    Artwork, production designs, and correspondence that decorated Prince's office walls are also present. Prince framed correspondence from George Abbott, Elaine Steinbeck, President Bill Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore; and costume and set designs from Show Boat, Grind, and Great God Brown, among others. Many of the production designs are inscribed by the designers to Prince.

    This series includes audio and visual materials, such as recordings of publicity pertaining to Prince, such as the BBC's American Showmen radio program on Prince.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Gifted by Harold Prince in 1986. Additions donated by Judith Prince in 2022.

Revision History

Biographical note revised by Annemarie van Roessel, Billy Rose Theatre Division (2021.)

Date correction to Box 3, Folder 4 by Suzanne Lipkin, Billy Rose Theatre Division (2022.)

Restrictions language for Box 356 removed by by Annemarie van Roessel, Billy Rose Theatre Division (2023.)

Manhattan Residence artwork additions (Boxes 358-363; oversize folders 1-3) added in Series IV; audio and moving image materials added; notes revised; and subject headings added by Em Longan in (2025.)

Processing information

Processed by Diana Bertolini. Additions processed by Em Longan in 2025.

Related Material

Harold Prince scores, 1964-1983. Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Ruth Mitchell papers, 1887-1999 [bulk 1946-1999]. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Using the collection

Location

Billy Rose Theatre Division
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498
Third Floor

Access restrictions

Inquiries regarding audio and moving image materials in the collection may be directed to the Billy Rose Theatre Division (theatre@nypl.org). Audio and moving image materials may be subject to preservation evaluation and migration prior to access.