Harold Prince:1928-2019

I DID FIVE SHOWS WITH HAL PRINCE. I WAS A rehearsal pianist for Kiss of the Spider Woman, musical director for The Petrified Prince, an uncredited ghostwriter for a show that closed out of town, and in 1998, when Hal was 70 and I was 28, I made my Broadway debut as the composer and lyricist for Parade.

Fifteen years later, Hal asked me to be the music supervisor for Prince of Broadway, a show that celebrated his work as a producer and director over the six decades he spent working on Broadway. At the time, he told me Steve Sondheim was going to write a new song for the finale of the show, something that would sum up the whole evening.

A couple of months later, Hal called me to say that Steve would not in fact be writing the number—that Hal wanted me to write it.

It was impossible. What on earth could I write that would follow an entire evening of masterpieces by Sondheim, Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber,