Hal Prince is 85, but retirement isn’t for him.
As I reported last month, he’s off to Japan next year to oversee a $9 million musical based on his life in the theater, “Prince of Broadway.” It will be narrated by Prince himself — in the form of a Hirschfeld hologram (think of Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan Kenobi in “The Empire Strikes Back”).
But before he leaves, he’s mapping out yet another Broadway show, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story.
It happens to be Prince’s favorite Fitzgerald story.
The show will have a score by Charles Strouse, co-writing the lyrics with Eric Price (a Prince protégé), and a book by Tom Meehan. This is the first time Strouse and Meehan have worked together since 1990’s “Annie 2,” their unfortunate follow-up to their 1977 smash, “Annie.”
“ ‘Annie’ was a terrific experience in binding people together,” says Strouse. “And I really think of Tom as my best friend. But I haven’t been able to work him in years because he’s so popular, people grab him up.”
Since “Annie 2,” Meehan has co-written “The Producers,” “Hairspray,” “Young Frankenstein” and his latest, “Rocky, the Musical,” opening this spring at the Winter Garden.
Says Meehan: “I wanted to do one more show with Charles or maybe two or three more. And ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ was his idea. But it certainly has its challenges.” Indeed.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem an ideal candidate for a musical. Then again, did Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” or Christopher Bond’s “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” or Gaston Leroux’s Gothic thriller “The Phantom of the Opera”?
You may know them as musicals — “Berlin Stories” as “Cabaret” — all directed by Hal Prince.
Fitzgerald’s 1922 story is perhaps his most chilling. It begins at a boarding school where the narrator, John T. Unger, meets Percy Washington, who says his father is the richest man in the world, with a diamond “as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.” When Unger visits the Washingtons, he finds that they are indeed rich: They own diamond mines. They’re also greedy, corrupt and evil.
I won’t give away the ending. But as Strouse describes it: “It starts off as a Jazz Age thing, and then changes violently and then is enveloped by the macabre.”
Meehan’s major contribution so far has been to change the narrator from male to female. “She’s a young woman at this posh boarding school, and this predatory guy takes her off to this strange world of diamonds,” he says. “His family is the 1 percent. They control the diamond market and anybody who gets in their way disappears.”
He’s written the first act — “It’s got humor in it, but it’s not a riotous musical comedy” — and Strouse has written about half the score.
But Prince is still the old taskmaster.
“Not everything I’ve written is acceptable to Hal,” Strouse says. “So I have a lot of rewriting to do.”
Adds Meehan: “Hal brings his 20 Tonys to the job, so we listen to him. He’s a wise man about shows.”
Don’t look for “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” for at least a year or more. Prince has got “Prince of Broadway,” and Meehan’s working on musical adaptations of “Tootsie” and “Dave.”
As Strouse says, Meehan’s a writer who gets “grabbed up.”