Towering Broadway director and producer Hal Prince dead

NEW YORK (AP) — Harold Prince, a Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musical theater with such groundbreaking shows as "The Phantom of the Opera," ''Cabaret," ''Company" and "Sweeney Todd" and won a staggering 21 Tony Awards, has died. Prince was 91.

Prince's publicist Rick Miramontez said Prince died today after a brief illness in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Prince was known for his fluid, cinematic director's touch and was unpredictable and uncompromising in his choice of stage material. He often picked challenging, offbeat subjects to musicalize, such as a murderous, knife-wielding barber who baked his victims in pies or the 19th-century opening of Japan to the West.

Along the way, he helped create some of Broadway's most enduring musical hits, first as a producer of such shows as "The Pajama Game," ''Damn Yankees," ''West Side Story," ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and "Fiddler on the Roof." He later became a director, overseeing such landmark musicals as "Cabaret," ''Company," ''Follies," ''Sweeney Todd," ''Evita" and "The Phantom of the Opera."

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached by phone, told The Associated Press it was impossible to overestimate the importance of Prince to musical theater. "All of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him."

Lloyd Webber recalled that, as a young man, he had written the music for the flop "Jeeves" and was feeling low. Prince wrote him a letter urging him not to be discouraged. The two men later met and Lloyd Webber said he was thinking of next doing a musical about Evita Peron. Prince told him to bring it to him first. "That was game-changing for me. Without that, I often wonder where I would be," Lloyd Webber said.

In addition to Lloyd Webber, Prince, known by friends as Hal, worked with some of the best-known composers and lyricists in musical theater, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and, most notably, Stephen Sondheim.