HAROLD PRINCE IS TAKING A SMALL CHANCE WITH ‘ROZA’

“I’ve been doing this for 33 years, since ‘Pajama Game,’ and one of the things you tend to resent is reading about the bad years. It’s dreary--dreary for the people you live with. Then they read that this is a good time for you or this is a ‘comeback’ and you say to yourself, ‘What are they talking about?’ It’s been business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”

Business as usual for Harold Prince has been anything but. The consummate Broadway showman who spoke those words, and whose mega-shows have played such large houses as the Shubert (“Follies,” “Evita”), the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (“Pacific Overtures,” “Evita”) or the Ahmanson (“A Doll’s Life”), has returned to Los Angeles after a five-year absence with a musical called “Roza.”

Instead of the Eugene Lee superstructures he so often used in the past, “Roza” has one set (no moving parts), 15 characters (more or less), 10 musicians--and it opens Thursday in the 700-seat Mark Taper Forum.

What’s a director like Prince doing with a small show like this?

Business as usual. Because Prince, whose career was most significantly linked to that of Stephen Sondheim for almost two decades (they did nine shows together), has always, like Sondheim, remained open to change.

“Roza,” based on Romain Gary’s La Vie Devant Soi (also the source of the award-winning film “Madame Rosa,” starring the late Simone Signoret) has music by French songwriter Gilbert Becaud and book and lyrics by Julian More. It marks the first time in a long career that Prince, 59, who has directed a lot of opera and historically gone in for the Big Show, is perceiving small as beautiful.

“I’m aware I’ve done it,” Prince said, barely able to relax in the Taper’s upper lobby as the sounds of rehearsal filtered through closed doors, “but I think it was on my mind longer than I knew. Up till about six or seven years ago you could do a musical, lose all the capitalization, and still have it considered a success. I looked at the ad in the (New York) Times today: ‘ “Follies” (a former Prince show), the legendary musical.’ You can’t make a legend (of a losing show) now. Some legend: Another $5 million bites the dust. . . .

“The pressure you’re always getting from my point of view is that if you say no, it won’t happen. That shouldn’t be. It’s pressure I don’t appreciate. And I’ve been feeling it for years.”

It’s also pressure he’ll no longer tolerate, which is one reason “Roza’s” turning up at the Taper. And the saga of its development included quite a bit of saying no.

“When my partner Bobby Griffith died (1961),” Prince said, “I went off to Paris just to get away, and I met a girl there. She played a hit record for me called ‘The Absence of a Friend.’ I started to cry. It was this beautiful, simple statement about losing a good friend. And it was (by) Becaud. That girl, I married. . . . “

Around 1981 Becaud approached Prince about doing a musical based on the Gary novel and Prince declined. (“I’d seen the movie and was not moved.”) Becaud persisted. A year or so later, Prince wavered and talked his friend Julian More (“Irma, La Douce”) into collaborating with Becaud.

“The most enticing thing about all this was that I wanted to do it in Paris. In French. Well, everybody said, ‘You’re out of your mind. The stagehands will drive you crazy. There’ll be the long lunch, you’ll be sitting there after an hour thinking where the hell is everybody?’ ”

He was talked out of it. “The Broadway thing was already not giving me any pleasure,” he said, “so I decided to do it outside London.” When that failed, the producers proposed London, but just as the show was to go into rehearsals, it blew up, “for financial reasons,” Prince said. “I couldn’t have been more pleased. I didn’t think we had it right. We’d tried to conform to popular taste: glitzy music hall, lots of presentational stuff, a set like a big cake.”

He threw out the set, redid the show and, just then, was introduced to Alexander Okun, a Soviet designer who’d headed the design department at the Moscow Art Theater. As soon as Prince set eyes on Okun’s portfolio, “I felt as I had with Boris (Aronson)” and offered him the job of redesigning “Roza.”

“From that moment on, everything meshed,” Prince said and they were off to Baltimore’s Center Stage to try out the new “Roza.”

“That space (in Baltimore) is not unlike this one,” he said pointing to the Taper. “This is bigger by about 150 seats, but the feeling’s the same, the general atmosphere.”

Baltimore welcomed “Roza.”

“The whole nurturing luxury is something you don’t get on Broadway,” Prince said with a shrug. “You don’t get to go away, come back, work some more. The ends of both acts are brand new here.”

Even though Prince believes the astronomical cost of producing on Broadway has forced this change of approach and he likes it, “What we need now are institutions,” he said, “big places that’ll take chances. The musical should not be defined by the existing small theaters. You couldn’t do ‘Cabaret’ (which he’s restaged with Joel Grey and which opens at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on June 16) in this house.”

How big is big? Anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 seats, says Prince. While he recognizes the beauty--and advantages--of small musicals such as the Craig Carnelia/Craig Lucas “Three Postcards” (seen recently at South Coast Repertory and about to open Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons), he sees a need to keep the options open.

“I mean,” he explained, “Sondheim will say to me, ‘We’re going to be doing smaller and smaller musicals and finally it’s going to be a one-man show with a piano!’

“Take Carnelia. He’s enormously talented; I’m wild about his work. In the healthy Broadway of 25 years ago, he would have had a musical on every year. He’s not someone with whom you’re going to risk somebody’s $5-million investment. And neither am I,” emphasized the man whose “A Doll’s Life” lost roughly that amount. “It’s too stupid. Can you blame a truly talented artist for being gun-shy and not wanting the Philistines leaning over his shoulder?

“I’m not into much wound-licking, but (into) a certain amount of expression of anger which is better than defeat,” he said, still smarting perhaps from the Broadway failures of “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Doll’s Life” and “Grind,” a show he particularly believes went awry because of the wrong kinds of pressures.

Prince doesn’t deny or begrudge the success of the occasional spectacular such as “Cats,” “Phantom of the Opera” (his own runaway London hit) or “Les Miserables,” but feels they represent “something exportable, something people get off a plane and run to see and pay $50 a ticket for. They don’t represent a healthy theater.”

And even though he’s worked a great deal in London in recent years, Prince doesn’t see fleeing there as a panacea. “You know how workshops were the answer for five years? Now (it’s) ‘Let’s take it to London. We’ll have a hit there, then take it to Broadway.’ It won’t work,” he warned. “Trying every show out in London is lunatic!

“ This is the answer,” he said pointing again to “Roza”:

“The title in French is ‘Life Is Ahead of You’ (La Vie Devant Soi). It’s the Zorba message. Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. It’s a message I love.”