April 20–27, 2000

hit and run

Their Prince Will Come

Five years ago, Hal Prince stood on the stage of the downtrodden Midtown Cinema and hitched his name to a dream — the American Music Theater Festival’s dream of a new home in that space, to be named in his honor.

Now the Prince Music Theater has gone from dream to reality. And this fall the legendary Hal returns to his eponymous space, not just to shine some starpower, but to do what he’s best known for: direct. Prince will stage The Flight of the Lawnchair Man (Nov. 1-19) by Robert Lindsey Nassif and Peter Ullian, one of three new one-act musicals on a bill he has put together to highlight fresh music theater talent.

"I can’t begin to tell you what I feel personally about this man," says Prince Producing Director Marjorie Samoff, "who could easily just rest on his accomplishment but instead conceived a pretty risky venture. He’s not someone who just pays lip service — he’s truly committed to new work."

Prince, a Penn grad whose name also adorns a theater at the Annenberg Center, has been an AMTF/PMT board member since the early ’90s. Though this will be his first public directing gig for the Prince, it isn’t the first time he’s depended on its resources. In the spring of 1998 he workshopped I Love A Parade there; the show, which opened later that year at Lincoln Center, became the Tony-winning Parade.

Lawnchair Man, about a would-be pilot who satisfies his urge to fly by attaching hot-air balloons to his lawn chair, promises to be a more lighthearted affair than Parade, which centered around an anti-Semitic lynching. It will share the bill with The Mice, by Laurence O’Keefe, Nell Benjamin and Julia Jordan with direction by Brad Rouse, and Lavender Girl, directed by Scott Schwartz and written by James Waedekin and Philly native John Bucchino, a rising New York songwriting star.

The rest of the 2000-2001 lineup at the Prince includes an evening of Kurt Weill with chanteuse Andrea Marcovicci; a new musical adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; a new musical with libretto by David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly); and Leonard Bernstein’s glorious (and gloriously difficult) Candide, directed by Prince artistic director Ben Levit.

Candide will bring things full circle, in a way. Hal Prince’s 1974 Broadway revival of the Bernstein masterwork was one of the triumphs of his career.

—David Warner