Broadway giant Harold Prince has died:

It is impossible to speak of the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century without invoking Prince’s name. He is associated in some crucial way with a majority of the great musicals of the period, and though he did not change the face of the musical theater alone, he collaborated with such giants as George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in some of their most impressive undertakings.

Starting as a wunderkind producer with “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees” in the mid-’50s, Prince moved into directing as well, shaping intimate works like “Cabaret” and “Company” that deepened and transformed the scope of the musical. He was equally adept at spectacle, as he demonstrated with Andrew Lloyd Webber productions such as “Evita” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

I’m not keen on the later stuff, but I doubt that was Prince’s fault.

I’m actually surprised he was as young as 91, because he’d been around so very long. “Wunderkind” means “wonderchild”—that is, child prodigy—which indicates how young Prince was when he co-produced “The Pajama Game,” which became a big hit in 1954 when Prince was 26. His mentor was George Abbot, another huge Broadway force (and incidentally, even more long-lived; Abbot lived to be 107).

Found at Prince’s Wiki page, this fact increases my admiration for him: “He was offered the job of directing Cats by Lloyd Webber but turned it down.”

I would say “his death is the end of an era for the Broadway musical,” but his life spanned several eras. RIP.