The following post was written by the New York Public Library's 2019-2020 Short-Term Fellow Ashley Pribyl who is an Instructor of Musicology at Arizona State University.

Writing recent history can be a strange undertaking. Like any other historian, I spend hours in the archive, reading old newspapers and drafts of scripts, but also people’s journals and letters, often extremely personal to both the writer and receiver. However, because I study recent history, often, they or their loved ones are still alive. As I read through someone’s papers, I get to know them as a person. I learn to recognize their handwriting, their pet-names for their friends and family, sometimes even their inside jokes. I become privy to their emotions, their vulnerabilities, their lives. I know things about them that some of their closest friends might not know. They become a friend to me, even though I am a stranger to them.

 When the collection’s creator has already passed, I am prepared for the inevitable sorrow that will occur when I reach that final folder, usually filled with letters and obituaries. Sometimes, there is even a copy of their will. Even when I prepare myself, these moments can feel especially tragic, such as when I got to a slew of get-well letters in Michael Bennett’s archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale, dated 1986. Reading them, I knew he would not, in fact, get well. Bennett died in 1987 from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. That was a hard day.

But none of my previous experiences had prepared me for what happened when I was in residence in the Billy Rose Theatre Division last summer for my NYPL Short-Term Fellowship. Heading over to the archives, I received a text from a friend that said he was so sorry to hear about Harold Prince. A quick search revealed the news that I dreaded was indeed true—Prince had died at the age of 91. The man whose life I had been absorbing and living vicariously for the past ten days, who had inspired my scholarship and whose work had changed my life, was gone. 

Spending time in the Harold Prince papers that day was exhausting. Every time I read letters between him and Judy, his wife, I wanted to cry, thinking of her and her loss. I felt a weight on me, not wanting to pry, not wanting to feel like his loss was mine, as I had never met him, but nonetheless grieving for someone I felt like I knew. Luckily, I was not alone—the entire theatre community grieved that day. Concurrent with my project, Doug Reside, the curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, was working on the absolutely wonderful Harold Prince exhibit, In the Company of Harold Prince: Broadway Producer, Director, Collaborator, that would open a few months later at the Library for the Performing Arts. He and I had lunch and talked about our love for Prince, his contributions to the theatre, and what this loss meant for everyone. After that day in the archives, I took the train to the Winter Garden theatre on Broadway—where two Harold Prince shows that I had written about, Follies and Pacific Overtures, as well as West Side Story had opened—to see them dim the lights in Prince’s honor. 

Prince plays only a small role in my book project on the musical Company. However, the idea for the show—to turn George Furth’s plays into a musical—was his, as was the decision to bring in Boris Aronson, whose set design greatly influenced Sondheim and the other creators. Prince’s direction and creative input shaped Company, its subsequent revivals, and the future of Broadway. Perhaps even more important, his unflagging dedication to preserving both the past and the future of Broadway has afforded me and other scholars the ability to write and study the impact of his and his collaborators’ contributions. Donating one’s personal papers to the NYPL before death is not something that most artists do. Yet Prince chose preservation over privacy, and his papers have provided the foundation for numerous articles, books, and dissertations, including my own. 

The death of Harold Prince while I was working in his archives reaffirmed my commitment to history, specifically the history of Broadway. In the days after his death, I felt an even more urgent need to publicize his contributions to Company, to Sondheim’s legacy (and the legacies of his other collaborators), and to Broadway and American theatre more generally. Following my residency at the NYPL, I organized a panel on Harold Prince’s legacy for the 2020 Association for Theatre in Higher Education annual conference (now to be held online in July). By contributing his papers to the NYPL, Prince ensured that scholars and artists would have access to his creative process, personal insights, and helpful, though sometimes scathing, opinions. His papers allow us to see into parts of his life, from the mundane, such as budgets and investor reports, to the extraordinary, such as his notes on Company’s script, that would have otherwise been lost to time. Most of all, Prince lives on through his contributions to the theatre, including his staging of The Phantom of the Opera, which continues to run on Broadway to this day, and his support of new and emerging artists like Stephen Sondheim, Adam Guettel, and Jason Robert Brown.

Thank you, Hal. I hope my book will accurately and thoughtfully represent Company, its creators, and its social impact and influence on American culture.