Episode 109: Public Legacy, Private Equity

Michael and Jessica reminisce about the career of Hal Prince, the producer, director and Sondheim collaborator who reinvigorated the Broadway musical and died last month at 91.

Michael says:

Whenever I'm trying to justify my enthusiasm for musical theater to my fellow designers — many of whom are like my wife and can barely abide these things — I often will say, what makes it inspiring for me is that they're really very specific examples of total design. And someone like Prince would approach a show and would obsess over everything: the lighting, the sets, the casting, the performances, the order of the songs…

Also mentioned this week:

Fast Company, Legendary Type Foundry Monotype Sold to Private Equity for $825 million
Helvetica Now trailer
Artnet, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/getty-wins-jet-ebony-archives-auction-1606687
Images from archives and of 820 S. Michigan Avenue in New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Cut, WBEZ
Brenna Wynn Greer, Columbia Journalism Review, Historians breathe a sigh of relief at the sale of the Ebony and Jet photo archives
Liza Minnelli sings A Quiet Thing from Kander and Ebb, Flora the Red Menace
Steven Levenson, Hal Prince Saved the Musical
Jesse Green, My Summer With Hal
Jason Robert Brown, A Portrait in Song
Great Performances, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/harold-prince-the-directors-life-full-film/9138/
Playbill, http://www.playbill.com/article/15-bits-of-broadway-history-you-may-not-know-about-harold-prince
Ugly Gerry
Amanda Kolson Hurley, City Lab, What Internet Memes Get Wrong About Breezewood, Pennsylvania

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Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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