On July 31 Hal Prince, a titan of musical theatre, passed away.
Steven Levenson, Tony Award-winning librettist of Dear Evan Hansen, wrote in the NY Times:
“It is difficult to overstate just how outsized an influence Mr. Prince has had on the trajectory of musical theater, an art form that has been regularly pronounced frivolous, irrelevant and obsolete, only to reinvent itself time and again. Many of the key moments of renewal and revolution in the past 65 years of musical theater were thanks to Mr. Prince himself.”
Mr. Prince’s influence on musical theatre reached around the world, even to our little corner when we founded PSP with the goal to produce musicals that challenge our ideas of what a musical is and what musicals can do. That maverick sensibility came to us in no small part through the work of Mr. Prince.
Along the way, Hal Prince produced and directed the original Broadway production of She Loves Me, a smart and beautiful musical in which Katey and I would meet as the She and the Me, decades later at the Arts Club Theatre.
For all he was and all he did, PSP and I are eternally grateful. May his legacy live on for decades more through the work we do.
— Peter
New York Times on Hal Prince
