Cameron Mackintosh

Michael Kantor: So, here’s a broad question. If you look at me, I get cut out. What do you need to be successful as a Broadway producer?

Cameron Mackintosh: Stamina. And I think never losing your faith in your own belief in what’s a show, good show. I mean, I never actually think about doing a show for Broadway or London. I just do it because I believe in it. I believe the material. I think it’s a terrible mistake to be sort of dazzled by the lights of either the West End or Broadway. Often people take shows that aren’t appropriate to those places where they should actually stay in other places just because they think it doesn’t quite, they haven’t gone the distance unless they do it on Broadway. Well, you know, it’s horses for courses with theater.

Michael Kantor: So you said, if they haven’t done it for Broadway, what do you think Broadway represents within the music theater world? And I didn’t mention it. To the extent you can do a topic sentence, because I get cut out, that’s helpful. So for the music theater, you’re saying, what do think it represents within the Berman?

Cameron Mackintosh: Undoubtedly doing a show on Broadway and having a hit on Broadway is the most important thing in the world. I mean, you know, when I started when I was an eight-year-old dreaming about becoming a producer, you now, I thought one day I might have a show in London and who knows, it would be an absolute miracle if I had a show of Broadway. I think you can have a huge hit in London, and you can great successes that go around the world, but in the musical theater, that hit needs to also be a hit of Broadway And that is… What takes it on its final journey around the world.

Michael Kantor: Same show, London and New York. What can you say about a Broadway audience? How’s it different?

Cameron Mackintosh: I think seeing a show on Broadway, there is a buzz and expectancy, even if the show isn’t the greatest hit, you have a, there’s a sort of a buzz on the street about going out to see a show that night that is different from London. I mean, London, you know, there a fantastic excitement when you go and discover a new show, but it doesn’t seem to affect the whole city as it does here. I mean, and, you know, here when we are trying out a show… The lift man, the cab driver, your mother’s best friend, they all tell you how to fix that one. In London they just want to know who’s in it and is it a good show. It’s very, very different. Here everyone is completely involved with is the town going to have a great new hit or isn’t it?

Michael Kantor: What are the top three longest running shows, who produced them, and what do you think they have in common?

Cameron Mackintosh: I’m delighted to say that beyond my wildest dreams all top three shows are mine and it’s something that I never thought could possibly happen and I’m absolutely thrilled about it. They’ve appealed to a huge wide public. I think unwittingly myself and the two authors in question, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude Michel Schoenberg and Alan Bubeel, alighted on subjects which were universal in their appeal. And it’s that universality and the fact that they were very well done and wonderfully staged and terrific performers have made them. Appeal to an audience far beyond the norm, and also I think my own, one of the things that I’m proud of in the theater is that I have always been determined that a show in its tenth year is, if possible, better than the show was when it opened. Nobody comes to my shows and find them tired. I remember it keenly from when I was going to the theater in my teens, that the hit you saw in Love in the first year by third year, if it was still running, was pretty tired. Copy of what people had raved about and I believe the longer my shows run the more effort I need to put in and my team lovingly do put in to making sure that the audience expectation is surpassed and I think that has helped the longevity as well as the fact that they’re cracking good shows.

Michael Kantor: Is there something about the fact that they’re not star-driven, that, I mean, was that purposeful in the sense of the show that it’s going to be universal, you know, you can’t replace an ethical ornament or something?

Cameron Mackintosh: By and large, the shows that I’ve produced have become the stars themselves, as long as you have star performances. I mean, the one exception, of course, when Andrew Lloyd Webber and I did it in London originally was Phantom of the Opera, though we had gone into production long before we’d cast it. But there we did have Michael Crawford, who was absolutely the biggest box office star in the musical theater, and his name would fill any theater with a good show it. But he wasn’t the reason we did Phantom. He turned out to be the best Phantom we ever had. And his influence on that show helped other people do it. And there is a marvelous core of Michael in subsequent performers. And we were very, very lucky to have such a marvelous performer create our show.

Michael Kantor: These are perfect length, et cetera. How would you say the world of the Broadway music, again, here in town, has changed the most since you started?

Cameron Mackintosh: My first trip to Broadway, I think it was in 1976, I’d saved up my Apex fare and landed and I think I saw Chicago with, I don’t know who was, it was the original, sorry, no it was Cheetah Revere and Gwen Verdon. And I remember seeing that performance. And having heard in the business that, yeah, it was okay, but it wasn’t a really big hit the first time around. And I went, if this is not a Broadway hit, what is? I was just completely blown away by the sheer brilliance of the staging and the fantastic chemistry between the performers and the kind of stars that we didn’t have in London, in Cheetah and Gwen. And it made me. Want to go back to England and try and beef up what we did. I could see how the triple threat could really raise the stakes emotionally. It’s not that we didn’t have very good principal performers in London. But until Cats, we had never had the kind of all-round excellence in every single role that took the British musical theater to another place. I mean, I remember when we were auditioning cats. We got angry letters and printed in the stage and people writing and agents complaining to us that we were asking actors to come back for a third and fourth and fifth audition, which was quite normal in America, but in England at that point it wasn’t. When that show opened and it was an astonishing cast that I don’t think’s ever been surpassed in that show, there was a great sea change in Britain And within 10 years, instead of… Spending a year trying to find one cast, we could actually field ten companies that were the equal of Broadway. And I think that is the major change. The other thing was, of course, that when Cats came here, Broadway had gone through a very, very rocky time during the 70s. I mean, there were the odd hit, fantastic hit like Chorus Line and then Dreamgirls and, of course, 42nd Street. But there were a lot of empty theaters. And I think… That extraordinary sequence of British shows, starting with Cats and then Les Mis, Phantom, followed by Saigon, completely rebuilt the road. And in fact, literally, I mean, theaters all over the country were either brought up to scratch or great cinemas were turned into theaters so that there is now, you know, a massive stock of great theaters the length of the country which will house shows that are done at the top scale. And when I sent my tours out on the road, I made absolutely sure that they were what they’d read about in the New York Times. They weren’t, you know, the scenery wasn’t left in the loading bay. It was on the stage and people have seen it and that’s why I think the shows go on and on and on.

Michael Kantor: Can you help people understand how without a road, Broadway is inextricably connected to the touring?

Cameron Mackintosh: I do, absolutely now, I think Broadway is inextricably connected. Indeed shows that don’t necessarily make money in New York can find a great life on the I don’t think that was the case 20 years ago. I mean, the road had the few hits that would travel, but the road was very, very patchy and it wasn’t nearly as intertwined with Broadway as it is now. Now I think… The business would consider that the road is as important as Broadway, though obviously without the catalyst of a Broadway hit taking off, most of the stuff on the road wouldn’t work. Though there is a lot of stuff that does go out and bypasses Broadway, which become part of the Broadway series, which do bring in a great and very happy audience.

Michael Kantor: These are great. Here’s one for you. The Broadway musical here, anyways, is often referred to as a uniquely American art form. What do you think is quintessentially American?

Cameron Mackintosh: Um. I think I’d probably beg to differ, that is, I mean, I think the Broadway musical was defined by America, but the influences which go backwards and forwards and continue to go backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, you know, most of the great czars of the early Broadway musical were European immigrants that came here and made their career here. Irving Berlin, for one, you now, but… I think what we saw was that the European operetta form, which so influenced the early parts of the 20th century musicals right up through to Desert Song and Showboat, still had one foot in Europe and one foot over here. But it wasn’t until Gershwin and Boleyn assimilated American music. Threw away the sort of rather pompous constraints of European Operetta in the 30s with all those princess theater shows and things like that, that it sort of evolved into something that was quintessentially American and the jazz influences. Oklahoma, which we all recognize, was the great water show. There are still elements of an operetta construction in that show, which by the time Rogers, they’d developed, they had then created completely the American musical play, which, you know, we all still look back on as the, sort of, as perfection in construction.

Michael Kantor: So by the time you’re arriving with your shows, you’re really not thinking of Broadway as a place to showcase uniquely American stories, are you? There’s sort of a different, it’s a more universal story.

Cameron Mackintosh: I think around the world, the more universal the stories, the bigger the audience they attract in other parts of the world. The quintessentially American musicals about the American view of life, American middle classes didn’t travel nearly as well. You know, Hello Dolly would run. Nine or ten years on Broadway. In London, it ran two years. Chorus Line ran 16 years on Broadway, it only ran just about two years in London. The American shows that did have a phenomenal success and continue to are My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, both written by two of the greatest sets of writers in the American musical theater they’ve ever but the subjects are European, and I think it opened… That’s why they had such a colossal success around. But I think The Sound of Music worldwide is probably the most successful of the Roger and Hammerstein musicals. I didn’t say it’s the best, but it is certainly the most successfull. And I think there is a difference, but I think the difference has been blurred a lot. Though out and out American musical comedies are less likely to run in London. I mean 42nd Street, which is a myth, it really is the simplest of it. It’s go out there, a chorus girl, and come back a star. That is the one that’s had the biggest success. And Annie, interestingly enough, that was a huge success in London. But not many American musical comedies run five, six, seven years in London

Michael Kantor: Pardon me, you mentioned Rogers and Hammerstein. It would be great, because we’re focusing on that right now, for you to help us understand just how big their impact was in terms of influencing not just, you know, at the time, the Cole Quarters and Irving Berlin and so on, but just the next generation that’s waiting on that siren. In terms of setting up a model that then, you now, hooked you and so forth. Clear on the siren? Sorry. You all set?

Cameron Mackintosh: I mean, I think the greatest influence that Rodgers and Hammerstein had, certainly on me and I know Andrew Lloyd Webber, is that there was a sense of writing a musical play which appealed to both of us, rather than just singing songs and whacking in some gags. And a sense of construction and brilliantly fusing words. And music together, which is just an object lesson. Doing something that on the one hand is entertaining and effortless and on the other hand has terrific depth. The simplicity had a great deal of depth in it. I know Andrew told me a story about when he was first meeting up with Tim Rice before they wrote Jesus Christ Superstar. He sat him down with the libretto of The Sound of Music and said, see how they do watch what their sense of construction is. And when that show was considered wild and blasphemous and people were hanging placards in the street saying this kind of thing shouldn’t happen on the stage, I remember curiously before I’d seen it, seeing a little review on one side of one of the pillars outside the theater which said Ballard’s Jerem Kern would have been delighted to have written. And I thought, that’s it. It’s the same theater, but. It’s using the same rules, but to do it in a different, fresh way. And when Andrew and I did Phantom, and we both agreed that what we wanted to do was not a Rocky Horror type send up, but a sort of Gothic romance. And Andrew said, yes, it’s going to be two steps back to go one step forward with it. And we were always very, very conscious of the past.

Michael Kantor: What do you mean two steps back?

Cameron Mackintosh: Well, on the one level, the show was a throwback to those sort of great, glamorous 19th century operettas in form, but in other way, we were using that to actually do a modern piece of musical theater with a pulsing contemporary sound underneath the lush melodies that were so appropriate to the telling of the story in its period.

Michael Kantor: You pioneered a new kind of promotion. No star on the poster, no big critic quotes, but instantly recognizable graphics. What made you think of doing it that way, and did you have any idea how popular that would become as a sort of way of marketing?

Cameron Mackintosh: Um Well, when we started off with Cats, one of my best friends, Russ Eglund, was the graphic designer for that and indeed all my four big shows, and I’d worked with him for years and his company for years, and it just seemed to us that we weren’t doing a show with big stars and we were doing something that basically everybody thought we were demented, even attempting, and would be a complete disaster. They always used to love using the catastrophe pun on us. And so we said, well, let’s do something different. And also with a show like Cats, the more you try to explain it, the more people looked at you pityingly. So they had the idea and it was, you know, it’s like all of these posters which look wonderfully simple, usually take. Years of agonizing, fiddling and taking a bit of this and a bit of that and mixing them all together, but it’s usually something from left field which no one else could think of that comes in and makes something simple. And with the Cat’s Eye things, it was the brilliant idea that Russ had of putting the dancers in the pupil of the eye that stopped it looking like it was selling a safari or a new brand of petrol. So, um… We just, when we did that, we realized that we were, that we had created something new, but it wasn’t like, oh, we’re gonna be pioneering. And as far as the merchandising, I mean, we didn’t do much merchandising until the shows were successful. And it, I mean if anyone is to take the credit for it was Steven Spielberg. I mean where we went, well look what he’s doing with Jaws and Raiders of Lost Art. We should try that in the theater. You know, and Star Wars was, you know fantastic stuff, and we thought, well we might be able to do it. But what I’ve discovered over the years is that merchandising has become a sort of mythic thing that is so fabulous you do in the theater. But actually it only works for hits, and even then, only certain hits. You know, a show like Phantom and Cats and Les Mis have the subject matter where people want to take something special home with them as part of the experience. A show like Saigon isn’t the same. It’s got a different emotional beat. We did some lovely stuff with Carousel, but that audience doesn’t want to do that. Or My Fair Lady, they’re not interested. It depends completely. And if it happens, it’s nice. But I think it’s a terrible mistake to go, well, we’ve cast the show, we found the theater, now let’s concentrate on the marketing. The only thing that markets a show properly. Is great word of mouth. The rest of it is bunt.

Michael Kantor: Briefly, if you would, you mentioned the cat’s eye to the other emblems. I mean, phantom is pretty obvious. But the Miss Saigon one, maybe, pick a part of the late Miss. Just that moment of what it was that you said, that’s the emblem.

Cameron Mackintosh: Well, Miss Saigon particularly is an example of one that took nine months. I mean, there were butterfly wings, there was reflections of girls in pools of moonlight, the Hawaiian sunsets and then one day a bit of calligraphy came up and then bit by bit something that we’d remembered which from something that had been done six months before I said, why don’t we dig that one out? And eventually, we found about three or four elements that suddenly seemed to be terribly simple and yet modern. And the trick was, the final trick was we knew we wanted to get something human in it. I mean, the name Miserave was actually probably one of the simplest. Logos to agree on. Once we decided, and it was a big decision, that we were going to keep calling Lee Mizarab, Lee Mazarab. There was a lot of alternative titles that were thrown around, you know, and people saying, well, you, know, Oliver was so more agreeable than Oliver Twist, you now, and I went, yeah, but the thing is, what Alan and Claude I shall have written is the absolute bare bones. Of Les Miserables. It’s the entire novel. It doesn’t sort of stop before Fagin is unfortunately killed, dies in prison or anything like that. So we ended up with doing, keep calling the title as it is known and basically has not been translated around the world. The whole world knows it as Les Misérables. And so I looked at the original illustrations, which in the French concert version, which had been done in 1980, they had used an of Cossette with a broom. And we thought, you know, you can’t beat that. But what we decided was to just hone in on the hair. And once we decided that, I said, look, I want, I need some element that goes on top of that, which gives a sense of the epicness of the background of this story. And my memory went to when you go to great museums, you see old faded battle flags and things like that. That’s what I said to Ross. I said. Is there a way of somehow getting that element into it? And two or three glasses of very good whiskey later, Russ said, you mean something like this? And he’d put the French flag through the hair of Cassette and of course, the red in the flame, it was so resonant and so simple that from that moment, Cassette was born. But of course because it’s such a striking one. We have done some of the most awful things to that poor girl in all our various other areas. She has come over the mountains singing the sound of music. She has been hanging upside down for the Australian premiere. I mean, she’s had turkey drumsticks in her hand. She’s a game gal.

Michael Kantor: You may have to hit you up for some of those graphics. Yes, oh, we’ve got plenty of them. That would be great. Really, really funny. Just briefly, speak to your role as a producer compared to someone like Florence Ziegfeld or, you know, historically, where do you think you stand as an Aired American, Ziegfeld and so on.

Cameron Mackintosh: To see where I stand compared with other producers, you’ll have to come back in 50 years’ time and ask someone else, I mean, who knows? I always say, when people say to me, oh, well, you’ll be remembered after you’ve done this and that, and I go, I doubt it. And personally, I don’t care because I think what gets remembered are the writers. The thing that I am very happy about is that I know that. Several of the shows that I had been very instrumental in bringing to the stage are going to be performed in fifty or a hundred years’ time. And, you know, when if you went to ask anybody, unless they were an absolute buff, who produced Showboat? What do they remember about Showboat. Well, they remember Jaram Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, if they remember anything. The clever ones might remember that P.G. Wodehouse wrote Bill. And you say, well, who produced it? I look at you glumly, but of course it was Ziegfeld. But it wasn’t a show that Ziegfield went, this is my next great show. He was barely about when it opened in Washington, but he’d heard it had gone well. And then he brought it in and Showboat became probably the first great real musical that we’ve all built our careers on. And I think it’s right that it’s only the writers and their work that lives forever. I mean, who remembers? Who produce Shakespeare’s plays, and he’s had the best run of all of us.

Michael Kantor: Great. Jumping to some of the talent that, you know, the people that you’re talking about. Is there a way to sum up Andrew Oliver’s change?

Cameron Mackintosh: Um. Well, Andrew has an incredible gift for writing popular melody and also he has a great theatrical gift of knowing where to place the melody. I mean, he doesn’t always write the song for the shows it ends up in often, it comes from several shows, but when he, when he finds it’s right home, he’s uncanny in the way that he makes it work and you know, there are very few people that have written as many wonderful songs and wonderful tunes. In musical theater in the modern day. He’s unique, in some ways he’s more like the Julie Steins and Anne Irving Boleyns that would write a great tune and go oh you don’t like this one we’ll put it somewhere else rather than Stephen Sondheim and I know Claude Michel Schoenberg who won’t move a song from one show to another. I don’t think Fritz Loh did either, I think it was once or twice they did but on the whole. They will only put the songs that they write for that libretto into a show and then most of it, the rest of it goes into the trial. Andrew is fantastically accomplished, and I’ve learned so much from his ability to drive a show musically. I mean, it’s where, you know, I mean he’s always on the lookout for lyricists, and he really does have that ability to, to drive and see a show from the very first note right to the end. Stephen Sondheim will often only write depending on what his collaborators want. He won’t, he won’t. He needs a collaborator in order to have the reason to write the next solo sequence I mean, it’s not that he doesn’t have a big input into the Into the overall piece, but he very much he doesn’ like writing on his own and Andrew will find the person that he needs in order to complete the show he wants to write

Michael Kantor: Who are these French guys? You know, their names are hard to pronounce. I think for America, we know them all through the word. Maybe we can dispatch Jane downstairs and sort of tip that guy for another coffee break. She’ll be here for $20 and we’ll be done in 15 years. You know Bougliel and Schoenberg, I don’t wanna mispronounce their names. Where are they from? And why is their music right for Broadway?

Cameron Mackintosh: Um. Alan and Claude Michel and particularly Alan, who always loved the musicals. They were pop songwriters, like Tim and Andrew were, in France, very successful. In fact, Claude Michel used to sell quantious amounts of records as a singer. And they wrote lots of songs. They met, I think, in the late 60s and early 70s. And they never thought that they would be able to write for the musical theater, until one day they were in New York together. It may have been their first visit to New York, and they went to see at the Mark Hellinger Jesus Christ Superstar. And at the end of it, they said, people like us could write for the musical theater. And the fact that Andrew and Tim did their own thing, and it was unlike the normal musical theater that had gone before, released them to have a go. And their first show they wrote in the early 70s was Revolution Frances, which was a great big success at the Palais d’Espore, which is sort of Madison Square Garden type arena. And, you know, they continued on with their publishing and soul-writing career. And then in 1978, I had just produced a revival of Oliver. And Alan had never seen Oliver on stage, and so he came to London. He was watching the art for Dodger sing Consider Yourself and suddenly into his head popped Gavroche. And during the show, suddenly the whole conception of taking Les Miserables and turning that into a musical suddenly became possible to him. And he ran to the phone and rang Claude Michel in Paris and said, I think I have our next subject. They write in a very particular way. Is a very good writer and a consummate French lyricist. Obviously, even though they speak better English than I do, he always works with a partner when it comes to the translation. But he writes the original shows in French. The only criticism I ever have of them is that they take years to decide on a subject. You know, they sort of agree to do something about every ten years and I’m saying, I’m getting too old for this. But you know, I think they, of all of the writers that I’ve worked with, they’re the nearest in a way in their approach to Rogers and Hammerstein in that they’re drawn to subject matters about ordinary people that have a deep social underlying conscience. That they don’t understand how to do musical comedy. They’re very, they take their work very seriously. And of course, they love opera very much and are very knowledgeable about opera. But they don�t want to write an opera. I mean, Claude Michel would never say, oh, that’s what I really would like to do. He likes to do his own thing within the world of the musical theater and opera. And I think that’s why. You know, none of the two shows, which are two of the most successful shows that have ever been written, and, you know, they’re going to be done forever because they’re timeless subject matters, neither show has ever had a hit, song in it. But, they’ve bypassed that, and the scores have become standards and sell millions and millions of records. Because they’re scores that bear endless repetition, you never get tired of it. And, That’s it, you know. I think their scores will always live on because of that.

Michael Kantor: Can you very briefly describe how Les Mis came to Broadway and sort of the three-step process?

Cameron Mackintosh: Um, well, Les Miserables opened eventually in London.

Michael Kantor: And before that, wasn’t there any Parisian incarnation or no?

Cameron Mackintosh: Oh yeah, sorry. The first I’d heard of properly of Les Miserables in 1982, in October 1982, when a Hungarian director had brought me the original French concept album, which had then been put on the stage at the Panadis for two years before and had run 16 weeks. I vaguely remember reading a review about it saying it had worked very well. But nobody had thought any more about it, least of all the authors who assumed that the run was done and nothing more would happen to it, which was the French way. Anyway, he said, look, you’re mad enough to have made a success with cats. I think, would you be interested in Les Miserables? I mean, Les Misérables, God, I’d never read it. I went, sure, I’ll listen to it, I wasn’t doing anything particular at the time, but I said you must understand that if you want to direct it, and that’s the condition, I don’t want to listen to take it away, and he said, no, no. If you think I’m right, fine, and if not… So I did listen to it a few days later and I was immediately knocked out even though I don’t speak French. Well, I hardly speak any French and I had never read the novel. But I just felt, God, this is exciting. I mean, I never thought it could be a kind of world beater as it’s become, but I did think it was good. And I thought, I think it’s, I want to go and find Alan and Claude Michel and see if we could create a new musical out of it. And thanks to the success of Cats, I then had the financial security in there for the time. To develop it. And so I went to them and they were thrilled that I didn’t want to just buy it and say bye bye and wanted to work with them. So over the next three years I worked with James Fenton, a writer, and with them and then brought it to Trevor Nunn who suggested eventually when he finally agreed to do it that we did it at the Barbican and with on cared code recting. And so the show went on after a very long rehearsal period, no advance bookings at all, and no stars in the cast at all. I mean, Patti LuPone was the only name, and she was cast at the very last minute and actually missed the first two weeks of rehearsal because she was doing something else at the Old Vic. And the show opened to grudging reviews over the first few days, which then got a lot better a week later, but for some reason, the audience just flocked to it. And within a few days of it opening, and long before it had become a success at the Palace, Roger Stevens, who the late, great Roger Stevens who ran the Kennedy Center, came to see the show and just said, Cameron, this is one of the best musicals ever written, I want you to bring it to Broadway, the Kennedy center will give you money and we will pay for you to have it premier here at the Kennedy Center next Christmas. And that’s how we came to Broadway.

Michael Kantor: Didn’t it change a bit between the London conception and Broadway in terms of the focus, the characters, and not really? Absolutely.

Cameron Mackintosh: Nonsense. What happened? We moved a song from one place to another, only because Trebanand was so busy we couldn’t do it during the London run. But the show was three and a half hours when we first did it in London, and then by the time we got it in Washington it went down to three hours and ten minutes.

Michael Kantor: Cats, tell us about the opening night in London. I read some story about you heard somebody muttering something. You were really quite worried that it would have been.

Cameron Mackintosh: Cats was probably the most expensive workshop ever put on. We had no idea what it was going to be, and both Andrew and I felt, well, in the end, as it breaks all the rules, what’s the point of trying to hone it? We just have to do it. And if you went into rehearsal with just a list of poems, there was no connective tissue. All of that was brilliantly brought in by Trevor Nunn. And did with Gillian in staging and we had the great problem of the wonderful Judy Dench who was the first person to be cast and who attracted all the other marvelous people to play as cast which normally they would never have done but she so had such a good relationship with Trevor that she agreed to do it and she snapped her Achilles tendon within the first two weeks of rehearsal so we were allowed to extend the previews And she came back about two weeks before we were due to start, and slipped again. And we all decided that, no, this was not going to happen. At which point, Andrew and I quickly thought of bringing Elaine in, who went in with about four hours rehearsal, and didn’t even have the lyrics of memory, which was a late addition to the show. Angie has vertigo, and her big moment is climbing a staircase with lots of dry ice on it. So it was fairly fraught. The first preview was the first time we ever ran the show through from start to finish. The previews, the early previews were very bumpy. People were, some people liked it. Other people were gleefully running to the telephones in the interval saying, catastrophe, it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s a dog, cats as a dog. All the great old puns, it was perfect. Wonderful title for all of that. But within a week it had started to gather momentum. But that was no means a sure thing. The opening night, the first act was very good, but pretty quiet, you know, and it wasn’t hysterical at all, as people were wondering what is it that they were attending. And indeed the reviews, on the whole, they were more good than bad, and some people absolutely loved it. But a lot of the reviews were written away that… You didn’t know if it was a good or bad review unless you read the sub-editor’s headline. That would tip you in the fancy, but it didn’t matter at that point. But during the interval, so we were sitting at the interval going, my God, what are we going to do? Because someone had shouted during the Jellicle Ball, rubbish, in a very loud voice. And we thought this could be like the world of Paul Slickie, a night to dismember. And so we were ashen-faced, but we discovered at the end of the evening that it was someone who was drunk who thought they were being funny about the set, which was indeed rubbish. And I think Lady Howe, who was the Chancellor’s wife then, a formidable lady, sat behind the screaming drunk with a large handbag waiting to thwack him over the head in case he opened his mouth in the second act. So the second act went like a bomb and was also aided by the fact that I said let’s give them a 25 minute interval, a drink will help us all no end and so they were well oiled for the second act and had a fantastic time and so we thought we were about to enjoy a marvelous reception. Brian Blessed, who was playing Old Deuteronomy, suddenly ripped off his wig and said ladies and gentlemen please will you Collect your bags and coats and leave the theater. There’s a bomb in the theater.” And so we were ashen, no curtain call, and all we went down the escalators of the New London. And as we were, Andrew and I were in the back, we were one of the first people going out. And you could hear people on the other escalators going, those two, they’ll do anything for publicity. And we kept saying, no, no. Look, there are no cameramen outside indeed. It was a desert outside the theater. But anyway, it didn’t stop us having a great party. And then we discovered the next day that we did indeed have a hit. What we didn’t know. Was that it was going to turn into phenomena, but within a few weeks we did.

Michael Kantor: Do you think the, you know, in the relatively recent past, Katz is closed here, Ms. Saigon is closed, I mean by the time our show is online, Ms. Webb closed on Broadway. Does that signal something? Is it the end of something? Could you just start with the recent closing?

Cameron Mackintosh: Look, if you look back over the theater, there are always cycles where, for whatever reason, a bunch of creative people are all working at once and churning out great material. I mean, what’s accepted as the golden era of the American musical theater was when you had Rodgers and Hammerstein, you had Lerner and Lowe, Julie Stein, all these people were writing. Great great shows and they were coming one after another and of course with West Side Story as well so I mean it was you then went I think really Fiddler on the Roof was the last traditional great Broadway musical and 65 is considered the sort of watershed. As I said before there were the odd good show coming through but it then took us until the 80s till for whatever reason a group of English, French talent, and American directors, and Norwegian designers were working primarily in London. And we had this next sort of incredible surge of, you know, four worldwide blockbusters happening together within eight years. Something that’s rarely ever happened. I mean, it’s only happened once before of that scale, of shows that have really resonated. I mean I’m sure there were lots of hits in the late 20s and 30s, but they need to run. For a couple of years and play London and a few other places. They didn’t become the worldwide phenomena these had.

Michael Kantor: So you’re saying there was this big push and it’s sort of natural that it ended. What’s the new…close that off and then take us into the present.

Cameron Mackintosh: Well, the present is full of terrific shows based on existing material, like the producers, like Mamma Mia, great pastiche of Hairspray, The Lion King, wonderful animated movie now, a great stage spectacle. That’s just a period we’re going through. I mean, I think there are a number of younger writers who are going to be the next generation of Andrew Lloyd Webbers and Stephen Sondheims and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s. I mean we’ve just had open in London a fantastically original piece though about someone we all know called Jerry Springer the Opera by Richard Thomas but his style and his wit is terrific and it’s completely original. His music isn’t a pastiche of opera favorites of light. It’s taken the form and caustically making our audience hysterical in a modern way. So, you know, there is undoubtedly that’s coming through, and that will be the next step. And I’ve observed the cycle usually is around 15 years between sort of the great lot of original musicals, and then other shows that fill the gap and keep an audience bubbling along.

Michael Kantor: But what you were arguing about a moment ago was that almost all the great shows are based on a pre-example, whether it’s West Side Story, I guess. Yeah. You know what I’m saying?

Cameron Mackintosh: Well, from Showboat. I mean, you know, Showboat…

Michael Kantor: You know, showboat.

Cameron Mackintosh: Well show, I think if you look, 80 or 90 percent I think, we can all argue what are the great musicals, but 80 or ninety percent in my view of the great classic musicals that we would all consider are based on existing material. Whether it be a novel, whether it be film, or whether it a book, well I’ve said that, whether it’d be a, sorry, or a bit of a play, sorry, let me rephrase that. Eighty to ninety percent of what we would consider the great classic musicals are based either on a novel, a film or a play. I mean, starting with Show Boat, Edna Ferber’s great novel, Oklahoma, Greengrove the Lilacs, Carousel, Lilliam, Les Miserables, West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet, Boat South Pacific and indeed particularly Miss Saigon. We’re inspired by the Madame Butterfly story, which is Belasca. It’s Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Rue, it’s very rare, My Fair Lady, of course, Pygmalion. You know, so the shows that are great musicals in their own right and are original are usually one-offs like Chorus Line or Hair, or indeed Cats. They’re not shows that you can repeat in the same way. They are wonderfully specific. But the musical plays that become part of the repertoire are the ones based on great source material and it’s exactly the same in the opera houses.

Michael Kantor: Before we do My Fair Lady, it’s just for the broad opening of our series, is there a defining characteristic of the Broadway musical?

Cameron Mackintosh: I don’t think of things like that. As far as I’m concerned, the thing that defines a great musical for me is that the treatment of the story and the characters is original and that the music belongs on the stage and sweeps the audience on a great emotional journey, whether it’s to laugh or to cry. That’s what defines a Great Musical.

Michael Kantor: Um What do you say to people who say that the long-running musicals have chilled broad-

Cameron Mackintosh: I would say, where were the other musicals that were waiting to fill the theaters? I don’t think any great musicals have not found a home, and I think what’s been fantastic with the long-running musicals is that they have brought a whole new generation of theater-goers to the theater that would never normally go. They are also feeding the… The young audiences and the young performers of the future. You can’t keep going to theater camp schools and just do West Side Story in the pajama game. You have to give them new material. And that’s what we’ve proved with Les Miserables, that I’ve already released that to the schools and already a thousand schools, 200,000 high school students will, by the end of this year, have already performed Les Misérables with fantastic success, I’ve seen a few of them. It’s all about regeneration and the storytelling that are in the shows have switched on the imagination of new generations. There are less people working in our industry because our industry is so expensive. I mean in you know thirty years ago or forty years ago a show could run six months a year and be considered success. Now we’re in the mad position of you know unless you run ten years people think you’re a failure and that’s a perception I’m afraid of the media of they’ve hyped hype so that the hype matters more than anything but we’re going through an era of the world which Personally, I don’t particularly like, which is the era of celebrity, but it’s not celebrity for a cause, it’s celebrity for celebrity itself and being famous doesn’t matter. It’s doing what you believe in that matters.

Michael Kantor: What’s on the, you know, when you look to pick a new musical, and I’m thinking now about Mary Poppins, you know, what you have in development, why is that a perfect, you know, finger chart?

Cameron Mackintosh: Well, Mary Poppins is something that I’ve wanted to do for over 20 or 30 years, as I think everyone. Everyone goes, oh, that could be a nice idea for a musical. But like all nice ideas, it’s the nice ones, the ones everyone thinks are gonna be a success are often the most difficult. But about 12 years ago, I met Pamela Travers, who was then a pretty old lady in her early 90s. And I really liked her, and having met her, I delved in. To her books, which, you know, I’d only glanced at because my love of Mary Poppins came from the fantastic Disney movie. And I always knew that she had a view that she wanted the musical not to be exactly as it was on the screen, and indeed, it’s 40 years on now since it happened, and no one would want to be doing something which was fresh and groundbreaking 40 years ago and just put it straight on, at least aboard Disney. The way, the curious way these things happen in life is she’d always retain the stage rights for it. Whereas, and Disney obviously have the rights in all their own material and their own, and the film. But as I pointed out to her… Unless you found a wonderful way of putting both the Disney material and her material together to create something new, it would never stand a chance of working. And that’s an easy statement to make and it’s taken a few years for the right circumstances to come and with Tom Schumacher, now the head of Disney Theatrical, there’s somebody there that who thinks exactly like I do and we… When he first came to see me, he wanted to know the kind of show I was looking for. And it turned out to be exactly the kind a show that he’s looking for, so we’re two very happy guys looking for the same show, which we think we’ve nearly found, and it’s going really well and it is going to open next year.