THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
separate commemoration in
Richmond.
Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henri-
co), the head of the black caucus,
made it plain Wednesday that he
didn’t want to discuss Samirah
and his protest. “Haven’t given it
much thought,” he said via text
message.
A few Democrats who spoke on
the condition of anonymity be-
cause of the sensitivity of the
subject said they were frustrated
that Samirah had grabbed the
limelight. Even before the protest,
Democratic delegates had dis-
agreed on Twitter about whether
to attend the Jamestown event,
given Trump’s record of racially
divisive remarks.
By Wednesday, Samirah had
catapulted himself into the na-
tional eye, appearing on MSNBC
and drawing admiring comments
from around the country. “So
proud of @IbraheemSamirah.
You’ve encouraged a LOT of good
people today, man,” comedian
Patton Oswalt tweeted. Samirah
also encouraged donations in a
pivotal election year when all 140
seats in the legislature will be on
the ballot this fall.
The state Republican Party got
just as much mileage out of it.
Jack Wilson, the party chairman,
VIRGINIA FROM B1 sent a fundraising email in which
he called Samirah “a proven anti-
Semite,” reviving allegations that
first surfaced when Samirah ran
for office in a special election this
year. Samirah has denounced
them as a smear.
Wilson’s email said Democrats
wouldn’t condemn the delegate’s
protest of Trump because “Demo-
crats hate America.... For Demo-
crats, our history is only some-
thing to be ashamed of and never
to be looked upon with pride.”
“Democrats just like Ibraheem
could soon have total control over
our government in Virginia” if
they win majorities in the legisla-
ture in November, the email said.
“What will prevent Socialist Dem-
ocrats from rewriting our history
books and tearing down our mon-
uments?”
Referring to next year’s presi-
dential election, Wilson said that
“our very future as a country is at
risk in 2020 but our future as a
state is on the ballot THIS NO-
VEMBER!”
A spokesman for the House
GOP declined to say whether
leaders stand by the party’s com-
ments. House Majority Leader
Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah)
wrote a memo to his caucus crow-
ing about the apparent disarray
among Democrats.
“Virginia Democrats are tear-
ing themselves apart over the
commemorative celebrations at
Jamestown,” Gilbert wrote
Wednesday.
He quoted a string of tweets
that showed Democrats disagree-
ing with one another about
whether to show up, some of them
using pointed language to suggest
that colleagues who chose to at-
tend Trump’s speech were hypo-
crites. The day before the James-
town ceremonies, the black cau-cus warned that “those who have
chosen to attend and remain si-
lent are complicit in the atrocities
that [Trump] incites.”
Nonetheless, Gilbert said, 20 of
the 48 House Democrats RSVP’d
their intent to attend, “setting off
very public intra-caucus fighting.”
Other Republicans joined in.
Senate Majority Leader Thomas
K. Norment Jr. (R-James City)
called Samirah “that ill-advised
little bastard” in an interviewwith WCVE public radio after the
event. A spokesman for Norment
said Wednesday that he had noth-
ing to add.
House Speaker Kirk Cox (R-Co-
lonial Heights) warned that
Samirah had broken the rules of
the General Assembly, but in a
radio interview seemed to shy
away from taking action against
him.
“I think they’ve got to police
their own a little bit,” he said
Wednesday on WRVA radio, refer-
ring to House Democrats. “It’s not
always these formal censures. If
that was a member of my caucus,
we would deal with that internal-
ly, I can tell you.”
Cox said Samirah’s act was “de-
ceitful” because “no one thought
that a member of the House was
going to do that.”
Radio host John Reid ex-
pressed sympathy and noted that
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) expressed
views he didn’t agree with at a
dinner celebrating Jamestown on
Tuesday evening. Cox agreed but
said he would never interrupt
someone in such a formal setting.
“That’s the way it is, you know, we
were respectful,” Cox said.
But House Minority Leader Ei-
leen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) said
Wednesday she had no plans to
reprimand Samirah.
“There’s no sanctions,” shesaid. While Filler-Corn boycotted
Jamestown and attended the
events staged by the black caucus
in Richmond, she said Samirah
was not wrong to stand up to
Trump.
She cited the president’s recent
statements that four women of
color in Congress should “go
back” to where they came from, as
well as Trump’s attacks on Rep.
Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and
his district in Baltimore and the
treatment of immigrant children
and families at the southern bor-
der. “I think it’s quite clear that
the current president continues
to demean many groups of peo-
ple, including people of color, in-
cluding immigrants — many dif-
ferent groups of human beings
over and over and over again. And
that’s worthy of speaking out
against,” she said.
The real shock, she said, is that
“the speaker and other Republi-
cans in Virginia hesitate or fail to
call [out] this hate and this rheto-
ric and this language.... We are
better than this.”
Asked if the House leadership
stands by Trump’s comments,
GOP spokesman Parker Slay-
baugh said via text message: “This
is about Delegate Samirah’s disre-
spectful actions at the commemo-
rative celebrations.”
[email protected]After protest, Virginia GOP paints Democrats as unpatriotic
obituaries
BY NELSON PRESSLEYHarold S. Prince, the musical
theater producer and director
who championed adventurous —
even demanding — fare in a field
long known for escapism and
whose Broadway portfolio in-
cluded “West Side Story,” “Fiddler
on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “Sweeney
Todd,” “Evita” and “Phantom of
the Opera,” died July 31 in Reykja-
vik, Iceland, where he was travel-
ing. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by a
publicist, Rick Miramontez. No
other details were immediately
available.
Known as Hal, Mr. Prince col-
lected a record 21 Tony Awards
during a career spanning seven
decades. He was heralded as a
visionary who saw theatrical po-
tential in the most unlikely sub-
ject matter and who helped shep-
herd to the forefront unknown
talents, many of them composers.
He gave major early breaks to
some of the towering songwriting
teams on Broadway: Richard
Adler and Jerry Ross (“The Paja-
ma Game,” “Damn Yankees”); Jer-
ry Bock and Sheldon Harnick
(“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Fiorello!,”
“Tenderloin,” “She Loves Me”);
and Fred Ebb and John Kander
(“Cabaret,” “Kiss of the Spider
Woman,” “Zorba”). He also boost-
ed the career of young composer-
lyricist Jason Robert Brown,
whose “Parade” (1998) — about a
notorious anti-Semitic lynching
in Georgia in 1915 — won two
Tonys.
Composer Stephen Sondheim
— Mr. Prince’s longtime friend
and game-changing collaborator
— told the New York Times in
2000 that Mr. Prince was “one of
the very few champions of new
work in the commercial theater.
New writers are interested in
expanding the possibilities, and
most musical theater producers
are interested in shrinking them.”
Mr. Prince was 26 when he
co-produced his first show on
Broadway, “The Pajama Game”
(1954). With songs including
“Hey There” and “Steam Heat,” it
brought an appealing song-and-
dance style, as well as romance, to
a plotline about a labor strike at a
pajama factory. The combination
helped secure the Tony for best
musical and presaged the social
concern that would characterize
much of Mr. Prince’s work.
The overnight Broadway won-
der then hit another home run
producing the baseball-meets-
Faust story “Damn Yankees”
(1955). Two years later, he provid-
ed essential backing for “West
Side Story,” which retold Shake-
speare’s “Romeo and Juliet”
against the backdrop of warring
New York street gangs.
Even the risk-embracing Mr.
Prince admitted to having had
reservations about the potential
commercial appeal of “Fiddler on
the Roof ” (1964), based on
Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish sto-
ries about a shtetl milkman, Te-
vye, and his willful wife and
daughters in czarist Russia.
He later quipped to Forbes
magazine, “There are at least
three million Jews in New York,
and I thought that should be
enough to keep the show running
for a couple of seasons. But I
never foresaw that Fiddler would
run the way it did.” The musical,
directed by Jerome Robbins and
starring the magnetic Zero Mos-
tel, won nine Tony Awards and
ran for nearly eight years — a
Broadway record at the time.
Mr. Prince presented the rise of
fascism in Weimar Germany
through the lens of a dingy, deca-
dent nightclub with a sinister
master of ceremonies in “Caba-
ret” (1966, with Mr. Prince pro-
ducing and directing). He also
mined rich political metaphors
producing “Fiorello!” (1959),
about New York City Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia, and direct-
ing “Evita” (1978), about the
scheming, image-conscious wife
of Argentine dictator Juan Perón.
The Prince-Sondheim collabo-
ration included the hit farce “A
Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum” (1962), direct-
ed by George Abbott and starring
Mostel, before moving in daring
new directions just a few years
later. They largely created what
many critics dubbed concept mu-
sicals — works in which the plot
was constructed around themes
or ideas. Narrative structure was
often inventive. “Merrily We Roll
Along” (1981), a tale of a broken
friendship produced and directed
by Mr. Prince, was told in reverse
to bring bitter irony to the story’s
youthfully optimistic finish.
The Sondheim-Prince partner-
ship resulted in many shows that,
while not always commercially
successful at first, are today re-
garded as landmarks in modern
musical theater. With Prince
largely producing and directing,
these works included “Company”
(1970), a meditation on marriage;
“Follies” (1971, co-directed with
Michael Bennett), about a re-
union of aging follies performers
(and an expensive flop at the
time); and “A Little Night Music”
(1973), based on filmmaker Ing-
mar Bergman’s romantic rounde-
lay “Smiles of a Summer Night.”
“Hal is going to be much more
intrigued by problems he hasn’tsolved before,” Sondheim told
The Washington Post in 1991.
“Pacific Overtures” (1976), about
Commodore Perry’s mid-19th
century opening of Japan to the
West, was “a perfectly straightfor-ward play,” Sondheim said, until
Mr. Prince envisioned it in Kabu-
ki style.
Sondheim’s idea for the genre-
pushing, near-operatic “Sweeney
Todd” (1979), about a barber andbaker who engage in murder and
cannibalism, was initially too
small and darkly conceived for
Mr. Prince’s taste. “It wasn’t until
he thought of doing it in that epic
way that he got interested,” Sond-
heim said. “The whole point is not
to be bored.”Won over by Welles’s ‘Caesar’
Harold Smith Prince was born
in New York City on Jan. 30, 1928,
the only child of what he called a
“privileged, upper-middle, lower-
rich class, Jewish family.” His
father was a Wall Street stockbro-
ker, and his mother was an avid
theatergoer. Mr. Prince was capti-
vated by the stage when he saw
Orson Welles’s 1937 Broadway
staging of “Julius Caesar.”
Mr. Prince entered the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania with the in-
tention of becoming a playwright.
After graduating in 1948, he hus-
tled his way into a low-level job
with Abbott, the writer-producer-
director whose Broadway credits
spanned the 20th century and
who remained a trusted adviser
until his death at 107 in 1995.
Mr. Prince’s rapid advance to
Abbott’s assistant stage manager
was interrupted by two years ofArmy service in West Germany,
but he returned eager to make his
own mark in theater. When the
New York Times gave a rave re-
view to Richard Bissell’s novel
“7^1 / 2 Cents,” he optioned it the
next day.
With two partners, Mr. Prince
produced a musical based on the
book. They recruited Abbott to
write the show with Bissell and
co-direct it with Robbins, and
they gave a young Bob Fosse his
first job as choreographer. They
also hired themselves as stage
managers. “We needed the mon-
ey,” Mr. Prince joked.
The producers lined up 164
investors because “none of the
smart money would support us,”
Mr. Prince recalled. “The Pajama
Game,” starring John Raitt and
Janis Paige as the romantic leads,
ran for more than two years. Mr.
Prince also shared his first Tony
Award for best musical.
The next several years resulted
in smashes (“Damn Yankees,” in
1955, harvested seven Tonys) and
flops (“New Girl in Town,” 1957, a
musical based on Eugene
O’Neill’s waterfront melodrama
“Anna Christie”). Through it all,
Mr. Prince was a dervish of cre-
ative impatience.
From Abbott, he adopted the
trick of moving quickly from one
project to the next, setting up
meetings to discuss a new show
the day after an opening. “No
matter what happens,” he ex-
plained to Time magazine, “you
feel you are still working.”
“West Side Story” — about rival
white and Puerto Rican gangs —
had been germinating for years
among playwright Arthur Lau-
rents, director-choreographer
Robbins, composer Leonard
Bernstein and lyricist Sondheim.
In 1957, weeks before rehears-
als began, a key producer with-
drew amid financial concerns.
Other backers, doubting the ap-
peal of a show in which most of
the lead characters die, failed to
materialize. Robbins, already a
marquee name, wanted out.
Sondheim called on his friend
Mr. Prince, who immediately
agreed to step in. He persuaded
Robbins to stay and complete the
show’s signature gangland ballets.
Despite solid reviews, the show
was topped for best musical at the
Tony Awards by “The Music Man.”
Only after the 1961 film version
co-directed by Robbins and Rob-
ert Wise, which dominated the
Oscars, did “West Side Story”
become one of the all-time
champs of musical theater.
Mr. Prince began directing
shows in the early 1960s — the
Bock-Harnick confection “She
Loves Me” was an early produc-
ing-directing credit — and had
mixed luck. But he spoke of “Cab-
aret” as a turning point in his
confidence — a show where he
knew everything he wanted from
the performers. He also created
the musical’s atmosphere, its vis-
ceral sense of cheap debauchery.
“That’s the show that freed
me,” he later told Playbill. “I re-
membered when I was in the
Army in 1951, I went to a sleazy
nightclub in Stuttgart in the base-
ment of a bombed-out church,
and there was this emcee all made
up. We put that character into theshow, making him represent Ger-
many, and made him a metaphor
for National Socialism.”Enduring the stage flops
As a producer, Mr. Prince en-
dured a long succession of high-
profile flops in the late 1970s and
1980s.
Songwriters Andrew Lloyd
Webber and Charles Hart helped
reverse Mr. Prince’s fortunes
when they asked him to direct
“The Phantom of the Opera,”
which opened in London in 1986
and on Broadway in 1988. He had
earlier directed the Lloyd Web-
ber-Tim Rice hit “Evita,” a rock-
filled hit featuring Patti LuPone
in the Broadway production, af-
ter the 1978 London debut.
In “Phantom,” Mr. Prince was
credited with emphasizing the
title character’s sensuality and
intelligence instead of slushy
melodrama, as well as giving the
show what he called a “mysteri-
ous, perfumy atmosphere.”
“I wanted the show to have
some depth,” he told New York
magazine. “I wasn’t looking to do
Dracula with music.”
His romantically dark, cin-
ematic staging featured the spec-
tacle of a chandelier crashing to
the stage and a chase to a lake
beneath the opera house. The
show, still running on both sides
of the Atlantic, has since become
the biggest box-office draw of all
time.
As a director, Mr. Prince also
took a rare stab at a major revival
in 1994 of Jerome Kern and Oscar
Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical
“Show Boat.” Mr. Prince’s version,
with a cast of more than 70 and a
budget of $8.5 million, ran for
three years and garnered a Tony
for best musical revival.
In 1963, Mr. Prince married
Judy Chaplin, daughter of Oscar-
winning songwriter, producer
and musical director Saul Chap-
lin. Besides his wife, survivors
include two children, Charles and
Daisy, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Prince was a recipient of
the Kennedy Center Honors in
1994, the National Medal of Arts
in 2000 and a lifetime achieve-
ment Tony in 2006. In 2017, a
career retrospective called
“Prince of Broadway” had a short
run on Broadway to poor reviews.
In the new century, Mr. Prince’s
lifelong interest in new material
was clearly out of sync, as Broad-
way grew crowded with movie
adaptations and pop catalogue
shows.
“I’m a big believer — and some-
times I feel I’m almost alone in
this — that you can and should do
what you want to do and bring the
audience with you rather than
have them lead you,” he told the
Hartford Courant in 2005. “I
think that’s one of the problems
with the commercial theater right
now. Everyone’s dealing with sur-
veys and demographics and what
worked last year and all the rest of
it — and it’s a very bad way to
create a show. It’s art, for God’s
sake. Yes, it’s commerce, too, but
you can’t lose sight of the art. Who
else [but an artist] would do
‘Fiddler?’ Was the market there
desperate to hear the Tevye sto-
ries?”
[email protected]HAL PRINCE, 91
Visionary Broadway impresario won a record 21 Tonys
SETH WENIG/REUTERS
Hal Prince applauds during the curtain call of “The Phantom of the Opera” in 2006. “Phantom,”
Broadway’s longest-running musical by far, opened at the Majestic Theatre in 1988 and is still running.CORI WELLS BRAUN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
In seven decades on Broadway, Prince, pictured in 1991, had a hand
in such canonical musicals as “Damn Yankees,” “West Side Story,”
“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Evita.”MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Virginia Del. Ibraheem S. Samirah was escorted out after holding
up a sign while President Trump spoke in Jamestown on Tuesday.
“Virginia is our home! You can’t send me back!” he yelled.“There are at least three
million Jews in New
York, and I thought that
should be enough...
for a couple of seasons.
But I never foresaw that
Fiddler would run the
way it did.”
Hal Prince, discussing “Fiddler on
the Roof” with Forbes magazine