Harold Prince Exhibition Sets September Opening at Library for the Performing Arts

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will open its Harold Prince exhibition on September 18 in the Library's Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery, on display through March 31, 2020.

The free exhibition, titled In the Company of Harold Prince: Broadway Producer, Director, Collaborator, will explore Prince's creative trajectory, and showcase the team of designers, stage managers, press agents, composers, and writers he assembled to create so many history-making shows.

Curated by Doug Reside, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Curator of the Library's Billy Rose Theatre Division, the exhibition will display original costumes, set models, and archival video, and borrows from the aesthetic of immersive theater, inviting visitors to pick up, examine, and interact with reproductions of documents and objects from the library's collections. Facsimiles of the paperwork for The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees will be scattered over a re-creation of Prince's desk for visitors to look through. Digital re-creations of stage manager Ruth Mitchell's scripts will be linked to thousands of never-before-seen photographs from the library's collections. The exhibition will end with an open cabaret stage and allow visitors to perform songs from his shows or record their own stories about their experience with Prince's theatrical work.

Prince earned a total of 21 Tony Awards over the course of his career for both producing and directing. He is best known for his direction of now-classics such as She Loves Me; Cabaret; Zorba; the Stephen Sondheim collaborations Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along; the Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborations Evita and The Phantom of the Opera; and Parade. He passed away on July 31 at the age of 91.

For more information about the exhibition and associated programming, click here.