Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
Monarch of Musicals: Sir Cameron Mackintosh
Sir Cameron Mackintosh
interviewed by Alan Franks for The Times.
Just as the West End producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh is saying that he has no regrets about not having children, a huge high noise flies out from behind a closed door. It is keening but melodic and bears the unmistakable stamp of Fagin's boys. Almost half a century after the first production of Oliver!, it seems to freeze for eternity the condition of canny childhood. “Consider yourself one of the family,” they sing.
And Mackintosh does. The earliest players of these parts are now in middle age, barely a decade less than his 62 years, and he counts many of them as friends. Like the young characters in the musical, he has wangled exemptions from time's passage and is doing the same thing now as he was before he was an adult. In fact he was even younger, 7, when his fanatical Aunt Jean took him to see Julian Slade's Salad Days and he too got hooked on musicals. He went back again with his mother for his eighth birthday and met Slade, who also became a friend. Before his teens he decided to be a producer.
“It just didn't occur to me that I couldn't do it myself,” he says. “I assumed that everyone knew what they wanted to do. It was not until I was in my mid-twenties that I discovered this was unusual and lucky.”
Slade tried to persuade him to go to Oxford after boarding school in Bath, sharing the widely held view at the time that you should have something to fall back on. “I made a compromise of going to a stage management course at Central,” he says. “I was kicked off after a year and then got a job as a stage-hand on Camelot. I told myself, and other people as well, I'd be an ASM [assistant stage manager] and then a producer by the time I was 24.” So he did a Michael Heseltine, openly mapping out his path to the very top, with the difference that he got there and has stayed there for more than 40 years. “In fact I managed it by the time I was 20.”
Mackintosh involves himself in every aspect of his productions, of which there are 34 currently running somewhere in the world. He has fine residences all over the place, including an early medieval priory set in 600 Somerset acres and a castle in Scotland. He has seven theatres in the West End of London, which he has refurbished sumptuously.
He is worth about £400 million thanks to the mighty global success of such shows as Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and Mary Poppins. And, of course, Oliver!, the late Lionel Bart's conversion of the Dickens novel, with its parade of unstoppable hits. The new production famously auditioned on television for a Nancy. After a gruelling contest on I'd Do Anything, which followed the format of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, Jodie Prenger, a 28-year-old former agony aunt from Blackpool, landed the part of Nancy. The panel included Andrew Lloyd Webber, Denise van Outen and Barry Humphries, a former Fagin at the London Palladium. Mackintosh had misgivings about Prenger's generous curves, but declared himself “thrilled” by the public's vote for her.
He says that he forgets how many productions of Oliver! he has been involved in, but remembers the first one he saw. It was the original, 48 years ago at the New Theatre. He and his aunt queued up for the 1s 6d seats in the gallery.
He talks warmly of Bart, who had a similar relationship with Oliver! and with the generations of young performers whose careers it launched. Bart spent the last years of his life living soberly above an off-licence in Acton after years of chaotic excess. During the musical's first success in the Sixties his Chelsea house hosted continual parties for the celebrities of the day - Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Muhammad Ali, members of the victorious 1966 World Cup soccer side.
While Oliver! was doing stupendous business, Bart's less inspired take on the Robin Hood story, Twang!!, was collapsing in Manchester. This was an arrow to the composer's heart and he insanely financed its transfer to the West End by selling his rights to Oliver!. “He was an instinctive genius,” Mackintosh says with a fond smile. “He had a good heart and he lost everything to his own recklessness. What was so unusual about him is that he never spread the blame around. He took full responsibility for what he had done. He had that belief and warmth about human nature - which you see in Oliver!, of course - and it was everything that we think is good about the Cockney spirit.”
This conversation is taking place in Three Mills Studios, a vast old factory beyond the East End, which once produced the stuff of escapism no less reliably than Mackintosh. It was a gin mill, turning out the liquor that anaesthetised lives of all ages in the rookeries of Dickensian London. He says that his own life has been blessed beyond belief, and there can be no doubting him. Although he is no longer on the look-out for the next Oliver!, he remains as enthralled as he was as a boy by what makes a good musical tick.
Just as the West End producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh is saying that he has no regrets about not having children, a huge high noise flies out from behind a closed door. It is keening but melodic and bears the unmistakable stamp of Fagin's boys. Almost half a century after the first production of Oliver!, it seems to freeze for eternity the condition of canny childhood. “Consider yourself one of the family,” they sing.
And Mackintosh does. The earliest players of these parts are now in middle age, barely a decade less than his 62 years, and he counts many of them as friends. Like the young characters in the musical, he has wangled exemptions from time's passage and is doing the same thing now as he was before he was an adult. In fact he was even younger, 7, when his fanatical Aunt Jean took him to see Julian Slade's Salad Days and he too got hooked on musicals. He went back again with his mother for his eighth birthday and met Slade, who also became a friend. Before his teens he decided to be a producer.
“It just didn't occur to me that I couldn't do it myself,” he says. “I assumed that everyone knew what they wanted to do. It was not until I was in my mid-twenties that I discovered this was unusual and lucky.”
Slade tried to persuade him to go to Oxford after boarding school in Bath, sharing the widely held view at the time that you should have something to fall back on. “I made a compromise of going to a stage management course at Central,” he says. “I was kicked off after a year and then got a job as a stage-hand on Camelot. I told myself, and other people as well, I'd be an ASM [assistant stage manager] and then a producer by the time I was 24.” So he did a Michael Heseltine, openly mapping out his path to the very top, with the difference that he got there and has stayed there for more than 40 years. “In fact I managed it by the time I was 20.”
Mackintosh involves himself in every aspect of his productions, of which there are 34 currently running somewhere in the world. He has fine residences all over the place, including an early medieval priory set in 600 Somerset acres and a castle in Scotland. He has seven theatres in the West End of London, which he has refurbished sumptuously.
He is worth about £400 million thanks to the mighty global success of such shows as Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and Mary Poppins. And, of course, Oliver!, the late Lionel Bart's conversion of the Dickens novel, with its parade of unstoppable hits. The new production famously auditioned on television for a Nancy. After a gruelling contest on I'd Do Anything, which followed the format of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, Jodie Prenger, a 28-year-old former agony aunt from Blackpool, landed the part of Nancy. The panel included Andrew Lloyd Webber, Denise van Outen and Barry Humphries, a former Fagin at the London Palladium. Mackintosh had misgivings about Prenger's generous curves, but declared himself “thrilled” by the public's vote for her.
He says that he forgets how many productions of Oliver! he has been involved in, but remembers the first one he saw. It was the original, 48 years ago at the New Theatre. He and his aunt queued up for the 1s 6d seats in the gallery.
He talks warmly of Bart, who had a similar relationship with Oliver! and with the generations of young performers whose careers it launched. Bart spent the last years of his life living soberly above an off-licence in Acton after years of chaotic excess. During the musical's first success in the Sixties his Chelsea house hosted continual parties for the celebrities of the day - Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Muhammad Ali, members of the victorious 1966 World Cup soccer side.
While Oliver! was doing stupendous business, Bart's less inspired take on the Robin Hood story, Twang!!, was collapsing in Manchester. This was an arrow to the composer's heart and he insanely financed its transfer to the West End by selling his rights to Oliver!. “He was an instinctive genius,” Mackintosh says with a fond smile. “He had a good heart and he lost everything to his own recklessness. What was so unusual about him is that he never spread the blame around. He took full responsibility for what he had done. He had that belief and warmth about human nature - which you see in Oliver!, of course - and it was everything that we think is good about the Cockney spirit.”
This conversation is taking place in Three Mills Studios, a vast old factory beyond the East End, which once produced the stuff of escapism no less reliably than Mackintosh. It was a gin mill, turning out the liquor that anaesthetised lives of all ages in the rookeries of Dickensian London. He says that his own life has been blessed beyond belief, and there can be no doubting him. Although he is no longer on the look-out for the next Oliver!, he remains as enthralled as he was as a boy by what makes a good musical tick.
He also revels in the stories of how he doggedly lured Trevor Nunn into
the commercial sector to direct Lloyd Webber's Cats in 1981, then a far
riskier and more implausible project than its subsequent triumph
suggests, and how he similarly courted Rowan Atkinson over the years to
be Fagin for the forthcoming production, directed by the highly
regarded Rupert Goold. In the end the Mr Bean star turned himself in
voluntarily after getting a taste for the part by doing it at his
daughter's school.
When Mackintosh says he has no regrets about not having children, he stresses that he doesn't think he could have achieved what he has and also been an adequate father. For the past 26 years he has lived with his partner, Michael Le Poer Trench, an Australian-born photographer. They don't call it a marriage, he says, because there is no need to. “I'm lucky. I don't need the legal framework because I'm wealthy. I completely understand the need for some people to do that if they are in same-sex marriages because that's the only way they can have proper protection, with the house and so on. I've been lucky to have had someone to put up with me all this time,” he beams.
He is surprised to hear that two years ago a Sunday paper listed him fourth in a list of Britain's most influential gay men and women. He was between the founders of the gaydar.co.uk dating agency and the EU trade commissioner at the time, Peter Mandelson. Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Elton John were first and second respectively. He shrugs and says he has never been a proselytiser. “It's never been an issue to me. I've always thought I've lived a normal life. I think the normalcy of that life is the best advertisement for letting people get on with it and do what they want.”
He then says that he did nearly get married once, to a woman, in his young adulthood. “I didn't want to. It was on the cards. She didn't want to wait and she went and married someone else.”
Might he have taken another route - the road more travelled? “I know what you mean. I seriously thought of it. What's interesting is that I'm not sure if it would have worked out. Whatever your orientation is, there comes a point where the heat goes out of the passion and you might go, ‘Oh my God, why did I do that?'”
And if he had married conventionally? “I don't know. I do like children, but I've never wanted to have my own. My children are all around me, in a way, and on the stages of the world, if that doesn't sound too silly.” The latest brood, as if on cue, swarm out of the rehearsal room.
The only other context in which he mentions marriage is with Lloyd Webber. A strictly musical affair of course, but none the less, “we hit it off straight away and for several years we had more fun than anyone deserves to; the sense of humour of classy schoolboys on a good night, the same enthusiasm, the same level of boredom. A natural marriage. It was a happy accident that we were around at the same time.”
In this big evolving “family” failure looks like the most distant of cousins. But it's there all right, even if it spends most of its time in the foreign country of the past. There was his Moby Dick, fatally harpooned by bad reviews. And Martin Guerre and The Witches of Eastwick, relative underachievers. These pale beside his biggest flop, After Shave, in 1977, which can only be described as a stinker. “It was by some university friends of the girl I was going out with. Like a female revue. I tried it out in Leicester. Then we put it on at the Apollo. The moment we got the set on to the stage I realised it was a disaster.” His judgment was spot on. It was off in a fortnight. He tells this story as he tells all the others, with enormous relish. The man's appetite is positively boyish and a musical, even a dud one, is food. Glorious food.
Oliver! previews at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, WC2 (0870 8906002), from Dec 12 and opens on Jan 14
When Mackintosh says he has no regrets about not having children, he stresses that he doesn't think he could have achieved what he has and also been an adequate father. For the past 26 years he has lived with his partner, Michael Le Poer Trench, an Australian-born photographer. They don't call it a marriage, he says, because there is no need to. “I'm lucky. I don't need the legal framework because I'm wealthy. I completely understand the need for some people to do that if they are in same-sex marriages because that's the only way they can have proper protection, with the house and so on. I've been lucky to have had someone to put up with me all this time,” he beams.
He is surprised to hear that two years ago a Sunday paper listed him fourth in a list of Britain's most influential gay men and women. He was between the founders of the gaydar.co.uk dating agency and the EU trade commissioner at the time, Peter Mandelson. Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Elton John were first and second respectively. He shrugs and says he has never been a proselytiser. “It's never been an issue to me. I've always thought I've lived a normal life. I think the normalcy of that life is the best advertisement for letting people get on with it and do what they want.”
He then says that he did nearly get married once, to a woman, in his young adulthood. “I didn't want to. It was on the cards. She didn't want to wait and she went and married someone else.”
Might he have taken another route - the road more travelled? “I know what you mean. I seriously thought of it. What's interesting is that I'm not sure if it would have worked out. Whatever your orientation is, there comes a point where the heat goes out of the passion and you might go, ‘Oh my God, why did I do that?'”
And if he had married conventionally? “I don't know. I do like children, but I've never wanted to have my own. My children are all around me, in a way, and on the stages of the world, if that doesn't sound too silly.” The latest brood, as if on cue, swarm out of the rehearsal room.
The only other context in which he mentions marriage is with Lloyd Webber. A strictly musical affair of course, but none the less, “we hit it off straight away and for several years we had more fun than anyone deserves to; the sense of humour of classy schoolboys on a good night, the same enthusiasm, the same level of boredom. A natural marriage. It was a happy accident that we were around at the same time.”
In this big evolving “family” failure looks like the most distant of cousins. But it's there all right, even if it spends most of its time in the foreign country of the past. There was his Moby Dick, fatally harpooned by bad reviews. And Martin Guerre and The Witches of Eastwick, relative underachievers. These pale beside his biggest flop, After Shave, in 1977, which can only be described as a stinker. “It was by some university friends of the girl I was going out with. Like a female revue. I tried it out in Leicester. Then we put it on at the Apollo. The moment we got the set on to the stage I realised it was a disaster.” His judgment was spot on. It was off in a fortnight. He tells this story as he tells all the others, with enormous relish. The man's appetite is positively boyish and a musical, even a dud one, is food. Glorious food.
Oliver! previews at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, WC2 (0870 8906002), from Dec 12 and opens on Jan 14