Harold Prince, famed Broadway director of shows like The Phantom of the Opera, Cabaret, and Sweeney Todd, has died at 91. He won a staggering 21 Tony Awards as well as a Kennedy Center Honor. Prince was known for selecting groundbreaking source materials, from the story of a Jewish milkman with five unmarried daughters to a play about a murderous barber whose victims were baked into pies. Prince’s longest creative partnership was with Steven Sondheim, with whom he created A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, A Little Night Music, and many more. Celebrities mourned his death publicly, with composer Jason Robert Brown honoring Prince’s “endless well of creative passion.” Bernadette Peters called it a “sad day,” while Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber said “all of modern musical theater owes practically everything to him.”

“I’ve had theater ambitions all of my life,” Prince wrote in his memoir. “I cannot go back so far that I don’t remember where I wanted to work.”