New York (AFP)

The American producer and director Harold "Hal" Prince died Wednesday at the age of 91, told AFP spokesman for this legendary Broadway, which staged including "The ghost of the opera and cabaret.

During his long career, Hal Prince has received 21 Tony Awards, the Broadway Theater Awards, by far the record in the field. He died in Reykjavik (Iceland) after a "brief illness," said the spokesman.

Born in 1928 in New York to a Jewish family of German origin, he is one of the very few Broadway directors to have gone through many different epochs and survived the modernization of the world of musicals.

Hal Prince, who claimed to have been tainted by the theater after seeing Orson Welles in "Caesar" at the age of eight, began his career during the golden age of the musical, spotted by another sacred theater monster, George Abbott.

Engaged at 20 as a handyman by the man who would become his mentor, Hal Prince rose through the ranks and moved closer to the scene, eventually to be associated with the production, even if the function displeased him.

In 1955, at just 27, he won the Tony Award for Best Producer, his first award, for "The Pajama Game" in 1955.

There followed an impressive series of hits, including "West Side Story" (1957), before he finally turned to staging, his true passion.

"I wanted to write," he explained in an interview at Broadway.com. "But I was not good enough, so the next step was the staging."

He made his Broadway directorial debut with "She Loves Me" in 1963, before tackling, in 1966, what would become one of the theater's most famous musicals, "Cabaret".

His style was full of economy, with minimalist decorations. He has often boasted of producing his first shows for budgets well below average.

Hal Prince went through the '70s with the same success as in the previous two decades, thanks in part to "Sweeney Todd" (1979), and then managed to negotiate the turn of the' 80s and '90s, a period during which Broadway went deeply transformed.

In particular, he directed "The Ghost of the Opera", written by the British Andrew Lloyd Webber, who holds the record for longevity on Broadway. The musical has been on the market for 31 years and has more than 13,000 performances.

© 2019 AFP