A Conversation with Eric Price
on the craft of lyric writing, his years as Hal Prince's assistant, and winning the 2026 Kleban Prize
It was a pleasure to speak this week to Eric Price—newly honored with the prestigious Kleban Prize—about the craft of lyric writing, creative partnership, and theatrical apprenticeship. A longtime assistant to Hal Prince, Price reflects on learning the art form at close quarters, sitting in rooms with Sondheim, and absorbing, day by day, a standard of rigor and ambition that continues to shape his work. We also talk about his two-decade collaboration with Will Reynolds, about finding new pathways to audiences, and about his work as an educator. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s great to meet you. I’d love to start with the exciting news that you are a winner of this year’s Kleban Prize. For anyone who’s less familiar, could you explain a little about the award and what it means to you to win?
The Kleban Prize is named for the lyricist Ed Kleban. He was the lyricist of A Chorus Line, which is how he made a fortune. When he died of lung cancer in the mid-1980s, his will stipulated that, since he had no direct heirs, he would direct a huge amount of his estate to be given every year to two writers: a book writer and a lyricist. This year, I was selected to be the prize-winning lyricist. I’m actually speaking to you on the very day that I’ll be receiving the award—the ceremony is later tonight.
It was a huge honor, not only because it allows me the freedom to work without the kind of financial pressure that certainly would exist without this prize, but it’s also an unbelievably meaningful endorsement of the work I’ve done so far and the promise that I apparently hold. I will be able to write with a determination, a sense of energy, that I certainly would not have if this giant honor hadn’t come my way.
I’m so grateful to be part of the legacy that includes some of my very favorite writers, who over the years have won this prize—especially because lyricists are not often pointed out individually. Our work is so intertwined with our collaborators, particularly the various composers that I’ve worked with. Certainly, I would not be receiving the award if there wasn’t extraordinary music to bring my words to life. I’m very grateful for all of my collaborators, particularly my longtime collaborator Will Reynolds, with whom I’ve written musicals for over twenty years now. Everything that earned me this award was certainly forged in my collaboration with Will.
It’s hard to ask the question “how do you two work together?” without echoing Merrily—but I’d love to know about the genesis of your creative partnership with Will Reynolds.
As a kid obsessed with musical theatre, and the idea of creating new musical theatre, I was fascinated by the ampersand that separated the names Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Kander & Ebb. The ampersand is that sign that signifies ‘and.’ The idea that so much of musical theatre was the result of a partnership between two people was inspiring to me as a kid. Separate artistries becoming fused together in a song… That just sounded like the most challenging, exciting way to create work.
I was always, as a kid, on the lookout for a potential collaborator. Will and I were connected by a mutual friend in the 1990s. We first started chatting online, and then we would send via mail various scores to one another. He came to a show that I did at some point, and then when we both arrived in New York in 2005, we got together in person after many years of correspondence.
When we got together in person, now over twenty years ago, we immediately connected and began writing. It has felt totally natural the entire time. The ways in which we write are infinite. Sometimes music first, lyric second; sometimes lyric first, music second. Always lots of discussion about style and tone, character, theme, dramatic situation. All of that obviously precedes the writing, but then at a certain point, you really trust that the other person can carry the ball forward, and you go with them. Whoever seems to have the catalyzing energy at any given moment is able to take the lead, knowing that the other person is right there in step with them.
Oftentimes a lyric might begin a process, it’s then set to music, and then that music is the framework for lyrics that had yet to be written the first time around. The benefit to writing with someone for two decades is that you write in every possible configuration, and you get pretty comfortable doing it.
One of the things that fascinates me about your musical The Violet Hour is the ecosystem of a studio album and online distribution as a method of getting a new work out there. When you were growing up, looking up to these great figures (Sondheim included), did that world already feel quite distant in terms of how to actually get a show made?
Stephen Sondheim has been my artistic hero for my entire life, and the body of work that he was able to create completely shaped my sensibilities and my standards and informed the kind of artist that I hope to be. But the other figure who was transformative for me was Hal Prince. Hal was the common name on all of the cast albums that I cared about as a kid—not just Sondheim’s work, but Kander & Ebb shows, Bock & Harnick shows, Jason Robert Brown musicals. He was touching all of the shows that meant the world to me.
I ended up reaching out to him when I was a teenager, because I knew that he would hire young people to be interns on his various projects. That’s because he started that way, as an intern to George Abbott. When I was 21 years old, I was his intern on the musical Bounce. I found myself sitting between Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince during previews of the show at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It was the apprenticeship of a lifetime.
That turned into a full-time job working for Hal Prince in his New York City office for years. My job was really just to talk about theatre with him, and to take any idea that was in his mind and try to make it real. This was the greatest education that any aspiring musical theatre maker could hope for. During that time, I was able to spend time with Sondheim, to watch he and Hal interact and collaborate.
And yes, the notion of how shows got done back then, especially watching Hal living in the modern world, remembering how it was easier to get a show on during the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, into the ‘80s… The distance between the modern world and how it used to be was clearly growing. Getting shows on was more expensive, more precarious. Certainly, producers were more risk-averse than it seemed like they ever had been in the past. Pacific Overtures, for example, in 1976, was a commercial production. If Pacific Overtures had been written today, I’m not sure it could get a not-for-profit production. It feels as though the world has changed, and that can be discouraging.
What has improved is ways to reach audience members. When the pandemic happened and all theaters were closed down, Will and I were sitting with a show that we had written, a musical adaptation of Richard Greenberg’s brilliant play The Violet Hour. We knew that there wasn’t going to be a time to do that show on stage anytime soon. The pandemic was here to stay for a little bit, but we did not want that to impede the progress of our show or its distribution to an audience that we knew was out there. We found a way to raise money and pound the pavement and gather artists whose work we believed in, who we wanted to employ during a time of mass unemployment.
We all went into the studio to make a cast recording at a time when no cast recordings were being made. The show had not been produced as a full production yet. We had had all sorts of development; we had manicured and developed the material over years. But this was a chance to represent our work in a really finished form, because we brought in a giant orchestra, we spent days in the recording studio, and then we spent months mixing the album and mastering it within an inch of its life, so that when we released it into the world, it really did represent all of our intentions for the show.
What’s remarkable is that, thanks to streaming platforms and social media, we were able to reach a huge audience—an audience that would have been impossible to reach a generation before. Because of that, and because word about the show was able to spread, it created this incredible economic ecosystem, where the streams of the show led to people wanting to buy the sheet music. The funding that was generated from the sale of the sheet music allowed us to put together a film documentary about the process of making the album—because we had the foresight, given that it was the pandemic, to have a camera crew with us during the entire process.
The cast, by the way, is second to none. It’s Santino Fontana and Jeremy Jordan, Brandon Uranowitz, Solea Pfeiffer, and Erika Henningsen. The orchestration is by Charlie Rosen, who won his third Grammy Award last night, having already won two Tony Awards in addition. He has outdone himself with the rich orchestral recording that we were able to put together. Our brilliant music supervisor was Andy Einhorn, one of my oldest friends in the world.
Zooming in to the actual craft, Hal Prince was famously exacting about function—the function of a specific song at a specific moment—and that’s something that Sondheim obviously shared. Does Prince’s voice still loom large in your decision-making when you’re writing today?
That’s a great question. His voice will never leave me. The voice inside my head that tells me to never compromise my artistic standards, to always seek out what hasn’t been done before, to bring bravery and boldness to my artistic choices, and to never, ever give up—that all originates from Hal. That was his credo.
He was the most relentless person I expect I’ll ever meet. His energy was catalyzing and infinite, and I won’t be able to escape his voice, which will always be in my heart. I’m so grateful for it, because I do feel that it makes me work harder, that it makes me show up more meaningfully, that it makes me more aware of the continuity that keeps our art form alive.
It’s also what inspired me to become a professor of musical theatre. I now spend my days writing musicals in the present tense. Current work. But then I teach the history and repertoire of musical theatre, where I spend time with the past of our art form, and the people that I’m teaching this stuff to are the future of our art form. It is a continuum.
I really believe that that’s in the tradition of what Hal taught me most of all, which is that you can’t learn how to do this stuff exclusively from reading books, or even practicing on your own, hitting those ten thousand hours. You have to do all of that, but you also need to learn at the knee of someone who’s been there before, who’s ahead of you in line and is willing to believe in you and pass it down. I’ve been the recipient of those kinds of mentorship opportunities so much that it certainly inspired and informed the choice to become an educator as well as an artist.
Of course, that’s a two-way street. Oscar Hammerstein wrote, ‘By your pupils you’ll be taught,’ and certainly that’s true for me. To have had a legacy of great teachers and to have a huge number of great students that balance my own artistry has been a great gift.
Are you able to pinpoint the precise moment when you know that you are fully happy with a lyric, after you’ve gone through different iterations, different drafts?
A first draft sometimes has moments where it just clicks in a way that you are pretty sure that, no matter what happens, this moment in a song is going to stick around and is going to somehow be essential—that it just really achieves what you intend in a clear-as-day way. I definitely have plenty of memories of that feeling showing up.
But most often, the kind of standard that you describe is the byproduct of rewriting. You have to make sure that the editor that’s inside every writer doesn’t show up too early, that the first draft is given a chance to be born and bloom, and then the writer steps away. And then, when the writer returns to it, it’s able to be seen anew and enhanced bit by bit until it reaches that state of so-called perfection—or not.
As writers become more seasoned, I think they become more efficient in their rewriting, and more confident, so that eventually the snap-together feeling that you might sometimes feel right out of the gate will occur. That’s why we keep going. I think that it’s very easy to either throw something out or say something is finished quickly. A writer who has some seasoning knows that the best stuff tends to marinate.
That’s really beautiful. Finally, what are you most excited to be working on over the next year or so?
There’s perpetual work to get several of our shows to a first-class production. Musicals like The Violet Hour; musicals like Radioactive, which is about the story of Marie and Pierre Curie and the discovery of radium; musicals like Presto Change-O, which is about a family of magicians all living under the same roof for the first time in years.
Then I’m also writing new stuff. Will and I are currently at work on a show called Double or Nothing, which is set in the early 1800s. It’s an alternate history of something that happened at the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life. The real story is that he was imprisoned on the most remote island on the planet, St. Helena. He lived for several years there before he died of stomach cancer. He was determined that entire time to find a way to claw his way back to power and get back to Europe and escape his island prison.
Our show creates an alternate history in which he attempts to do exactly that, but things don’t go as planned, and he ends up in America. The story that we’re creating, we feel, is able to be deeply theatrical; it’s about identity, it’s about power, it’s about freedom. So I’m really excited to spend this year finishing the drafting of Double or Nothing.
Learn more about Eric’s work by visiting his website.
Learn more about The Violet Hour by clicking here.
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Eric is a remarkable teacher and artist, I can’t wait to see the impact he and Will make on the industry