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Pryce plays The Engineer with a devastating theatricality

Broadway the chance to see one of the most remarkable star turns of recent West End memory, all the more extraordinary because this is Pryce's first-ever musical and one of which The New York Times's Frank Rich wrote, "In nearly 30 years of watching musicals in London, I have seen only two dancing and singing stars who could be mentioned in the same breath as the Broadway greats that the West End has so frequently had to airlift from New York. One is Robert Lindsay of Me and My Girl, and the other is Mr. Pryce."

And like Lindsay, Pryce comes from a fundamentally classical theatrical background. Born in North Wales in 1947, the son of shopkeeper parents both now dead, he went into teacher-training college with a view to teaching art, found the drama course more enthralling, and won a scholarship from there to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. By 1972 he was at the Liverpool Everyman where he met the actress Kate Fahy, with whom he has shared his life almost ever since. A couple of years after that, at the Nottingham Playhouse, he started playing the role that made him a star, Gethin Price in Comedians, the would-be comic who jettisons an agreed script in favor of an ice-cold revolutionary turn advocating death and destruction in the name of social reform. 

"My mother told me that after my father saw me in the play with the old teacher, he cried because he had always wanted to be closer to me. Quite soon after that someone attacked him in the street, he had a stroke and couldn't speak for almost two years. For the first time we began to draw close. When I was on Broadway with Comedians, I would phone him and have these one-sided conversations, answering the questions I knew he wanted to ask me."

It was soon after his father died that Pryce gave the other great pre-Saigon performance of his career, as a Royal Court Hamlet whose ghostly father came to him not as another stage presence, but as a deep voice welling up in Exorcist style from within Hamlet himself. Along the 15-year trail from Comedians, there has been one other Broadway appearance (in a very short-lived staging of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist), some Royal Shakespeare successes as Macbeth and Petruchio and Octavius Caesar, and a whole range of movies from The Plowman's Lunch through Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes to the Terry Gilliam gothic extravaganza Brazil.

But Pryce remains quintessentially a stage actor, with a powerhouse theatricality which makes his "American Dream" number in Miss Saigon one of the great musical climaxes of our time, and one that has already won him the two most prestigious West End acting awards of the last year:

"I had sung the occasional song in plays or concerts but nothing like a musical, and when I first sang for Cameron Mackintosh, it wasn't for Miss Saigon at all. There was some thought that I might be able to replace Michael Crawford in the London cast of Phantom of the Opera, but the more I considered it the more I felt that all the creative work there had already been done by Michael, and there wasn't a lot more that I could bring to it. But then when Miss Saigon came along, with the chance to create The Engineer, it was irresistible. In the past I've always found a run of anything more than about three months in the same play almost unbearable, but musicals are different. It's like climbing onto a train every night with the orchestra and setting off on some great journey, and the energy that comes back at you from the pit is what keeps you going. It's the most exhausting, but also the most invigorating, thing I know."

Alongside Lea Salonga in the title role, his performance as the Eurasian opportunist pimp forever hovering and surviving on the very borderline where the American immigrant dream becomes a nightmare is the great triumph of this Boubil/Schnberg Madame Butterfly for our post-Vietnam times. 

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