I was scheduled for 0 panels and 0 signings at the New York Comic-Con on Saturday. Recalling the hassles of the previous two days — getting to the convention, getting around the convention, getting something to eat at the convention, getting away from the convention — I decided to make 0 appearances there that day.
Instead, Amber and I saw sights, did some shopping and dined with my cousin David (author of this book and others worthy of your attention) and his lovely wife Dini. Then it was on to our show for Saturday night…
I adapted the following from something I found online…
Harold Prince directed the original productions of — among other shows — She Loves Me, It's a Bird…Superman, Cabaret, Zorba, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, On the Twentieth Century, Sweeney Todd, Evita, Merrily We Roll Along, The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Parade and LoveMusik. He directed acclaimed revivals of Candide and Show Boat and also produced the original productions of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, New Girl in Town, West Side Story, Fiorello!, Tenderloin, Flora the Red Menace, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof. He is the recipient of 21 Tony Awards, a Kennedy Center Honor and a National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton.
Prince of Broadway, which is playing for not that many more weeks at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a "greatest hits" musical using showstopper numbers from sixteen or so of the above musicals, interspersed with quotes from Prince about his career. What's good about it is that if you flip through the rundowns of those shows, it's pretty easy to pick sixteen great numbers, though it might be easier to pick sixty.
Also what's good about it is that those numbers are performed by nine wonderfully-gifted musical comedy performers and each of them has a number or two to hit it out of the park. Everyone was good but my two standouts were Bryonha Marie Parham belting the title song from Cabaret about as well as it could possibly be belted, and Karen Ziemba (always a favorite) playing Mrs. Lovett in the Sweeney Todd excerpt and making one wish she'd play it for an entire production.
And of note: We have reached the stage in color-blind casting where a black guy can play Tevye and you don't hear one eyebrow being raised. I'm fine with that. If there was any problem with "If I Were a Rich Man," it wasn't that the actor was black but that he wasn't Zero Mostel.
Which brings us to the first of a couple of problems with a show like this. Nine people do the work of a few dozen great performers and while they're all good, you can only stretch a cast of nine so far. Also, these were great numbers in the context of their shows. Some of them lose something as stand-alones. And there isn't much insight into Mr. Prince, his modus operandi, his place in theatrical history and so on. It's just a lot of great numbers, sparsely annotated.
The show closes with the best moments from Phantom of the Opera, saving us the chore of walking the three blocks to see the whole show, which is still running and probably always will be. Then there's a new number for the finale called "Do the Work," which is supposed to sum up Prince's philosophy. It's a nice philosophy but we kinda know he wouldn't be the most successful director ever — and deserving of a show like this — if he hadn't done the work.
It all made for a nice-enough evening and I'm sorry to see that there doesn't seem to be a cast album because I'd sure like to hear a few of those numbers again. Guess I'll have to make do with the original hits.