Producer Cameron Mackintosh backs musicals with new ideas, faith and money
British impresario Cameron Mackintosh is breathing new life into old musicals, writes Michael Billington
Even by his own dynamic standards, the past couple of months have been unusually busy for Cameron Mackintosh. One night saw the opening of his new production of Miss Saigon that had already clocked up more than £10 million (HK$133 million) in advance sales. The next day Mackintosh announced he was buying two new London theatres in the West End - the Victoria Palace and the Ambassadors - to add to his existing seven-strong portfolio.
When you consider that he has produced the three longest-running musicals of all time - Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Cats - and that he is worth an estimated US$1.1 billion, you may think of him as a mega-tycoon. Yet, talking to Mackintosh in his offices, I'm struck by how he has remained the same bubbly enthusiast I have known on and off for 40 years.
You go expecting to meet Citizen Kane: you get Peter Pan.
Mackintosh, although now 67, has the unlined features and bright-eyed fervour of someone who has spent all his life doing precisely what he wants: putting on shows. And he brings to the acquisition of theatres the same enthusiasm and microscopic attention to detail that he does to producing musicals.
“No one thinks twice about there being a dozen different Hamlets or King Lears, but people seem sceptical about revived musicals.”
e is excited by his purchase of the Victoria Palace and the Ambassadors (to be renamed the Sondheim). "I love old buildings," he says, "and if I hadn't been a theatre producer, I'd have been an interfering architect. The Victoria Palace is the best house designed by the great Frank Matcham from the point of view of intimacy and sight lines, and will have an extra stage depth of 20 feet [six metres]."