News

Meet the man behind the Broadway blockbusters

Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of some of the biggest hits, talks about what works onstage.

By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published September 14, 2007

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My Fair Lady
The Cameron Mackintosh production has performances at 8 tonight and 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $32.50-$67.50. (813) 229-7827; www.tbpac.org. 

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TAMPA - Most producers mainly bring money to a theater project, but Cameron Mackintosh is different. Teaming with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1980s on Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, Mackintosh created a genre of spectacular musicals that ran for years on Broadway and in London's West End and toured all over the world. Even without Lloyd Webber, Mackintosh was the producer with the Midas touch in launching long-running blockbusters like Les Miserables and Miss Saigon.

Today, Mackintosh brings more than savvy to a show, with a fortune estimated at $800-million and ownership of seven London theaters. His current shows include Mary Poppins and the U.S. company of a British revival of My Fair Lady, which was remounted at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. It has three more performances there before heading out on tour.

Mackintosh was in Tampa this week. On Monday, he talked with the St. Petersburg Times about revivals, musical theater in China and how much longer Phantom can last on Broadway. At 60, the producer retains a boyish enthusiasm for the theater, happily tramping around backstage, blithely ignoring his publicist's anxious reminder to wrap up the interview because there was another appointment to keep. Here is an edited transcript.

 

Why did you revive My Fair Lady? In some ways, I think, it resists revival more than other classic musicals.

I think that in America there is a little bit of that sort of feeling, considering that it is, arguably, the greatest single American musical, certainly in the top three. It is a completely perfect work of art. Not a note of it, not a word, is out of date.

I did this version because I was able to get a director of the caliber of Trevor Nunn, the choreographer Matthew Bourne, the designer Anthony Ward and the marvelous Bill Brohn to redo the orchestrations. I think this was the greatest production team put together, the cream of British theater, since the original.

Plus it sort of hits the moment. Over the last five years, the whole notion of overnight stardom on television and things like that is current. Everyone's looking for a star break, and that is what the story of Pygmalion is about. Therefore, the younger generation is looking at something they instantly understand.

 

The production got great reviews in London. Why didn't it go to Broadway?

Because there was never a star that was big enough for the Broadway theater owners to fall over themselves about. Over here, with revivals, it's all about a star. In England, we revive it because the material requires you to revive it, and we cast it as well as we can. Here, the Broadway ethos is you revive a show if you've got a big star, which more often than not doesn't work.

 

You've produced three large-scale revivals in recent years: Oliver!, Oklahoma! and now My Fair Lady. Are there any revivals left worth doing?

I'll be fascinated to see what happens with Bye Bye Birdie, which is a show I've always loved, but how the draft and all of that - somebody going off to war - will play in 2008 I don't know.

 

West Side Story is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year Why hasn't it been revived in a big way?

It's a combination of the Leonard Bernstein trust and (the late director-choreographer) Jerry Robbins. No self-respecting director wants to be hidebound to Jerry's choreography, which is genius, but you don't want all of it. What you want is a new choreographer who could take certain key signatures of Jerry Robbins and create it with a new director. Arthur (Laurents, book author of West Side Story) feels quite passionately that the setting of it is anachronistic and he is actively working on a way of making it more contemporary. But it needs to be handed to a really terrific director or director-choreographer to create something new. Romeo and Juliet hasn't died by lots of different productions. Why should West Side Story?

 

Surely that is a project that has Matthew Bourne written all over it.

Absolutely, and I would say that Matthew Bourne would reimagine it brilliantly, but I wouldn't say that even he would think his own choreography would match Jerry Robbins'. What you want is a fusion.

All the great English directors want to do it. Trevor Nunn wants to do it. Nick Hytner wants to do it. Richard Eyre wants to do it. And I'm sure the great American directors do too.

You had that incredible run in the 1980s from Cats to Les Miz to Phantom to Miss Saigon. What was in the air that made that happen?

How's the lyric go? "What's that I smell in the air? The American dream."

 

What's that from?

Miss Saigon. Look, Andrew and I were both - I'm a year older than him - in our mid 30s when we met. We both had the same enthusiasm for what we wanted musical theater to be. And we stumbled upon stories which - though we didn't realize it at the time - had a worldwide appeal. They were timeless stories.

Andrew didn't know he was writing Cats, he was just doing a setting of T.S. Eliot poems. Everybody thought it was a terrible idea. I thought there was something there. Within 18 months, we'd turned out, between us, this extraordinary show. It wasn't that we were brilliant geniuses - of course, we are - it's just that he had an instinct that the material had a theatrical life, and I could smell that something to do with song and dance would work.

 

Phantom will celebrate 20 years on Broadway in January. How much longer can it run?

I would say certainly another five years. There was a point four years ago when all of us thought that we should do a graceful exit. And then the movie came out and gave it a whole new lease of life.

 

The era of blockbusters like Phantom is over. What's the next big thing?

The problem is I never think there's enough good work that is worth doing. That's the reason why so many shows are either revivals or reworking of old material. Really, Wicked is the first big book musical that has been an enormous success in America since Saigon. Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys reuse old material in a very original way. But on the book shows there haven't been stories that have caught the public imagination with original stuff, except Wicked.

 

I've read that you see China as a possible big new market for musicals.

In the last five years I've taken Les Miserables, Cats, Phantom, Lion King and Mamma Mia! to China, mostly to Shanghai, though a couple of them have been to Beijing. It was to find out if the Chinese liked these kind of Western musical stories, and they do. They seem to be very, very intrigued. They like storytelling. Of course, they would love to hear it in their own language. Now they've got Mandarin supertitles - which does work. It's like going to the opera. However, for the stories really to work, it needs to be in Mandarin, but they have no history of translation. It's not like any other country in the world. You're starting from scratch.

I'm told that the Chinese middle class is over 350-million, which is more than the entire population of America. In theory, the musical theater could be hugely successful there.

 

Have you been on that BBC radio program Desert Island Discs on which guests are asked to imagine themselves as stranded and choose pieces of music they would take with them?

I have been and I picked pieces by musical theater composers that had meant something to me and threw in some Elgar as well.

 

If you had to narrow it down to just one recording, which would it be?

That is very unfair. . . . I'm not going to discuss shows I originally produced - that's for other people to choose - but of those I haven't done, it would be a toss-up between West Side Story and My Fair Lady.

John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.

 

[Last modified September 12, 2007, 18:01:08]