Producer Mackintosh on his classics coming to S.F.
New ‘Miss Saigon,’ ‘Phantom,’ ‘Les Miz’ are coming to S.F.
For Cameron Mackintosh, not worrying about a musical’s commercial prospects has been remarkably lucrative. The billionaire producer of “Les Misérables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon” — all of which are in new versions at SHN’s Orpheum Theatre over the next three months — doesn’t have a set of questions to assess whether a show might be profitable. “I never think about that,” Mackintosh, 71, says over the phone from his farm in Somerset, England. “I only have ever put on shows because I have personally loved them ... and I think I can get something special out of them.” Before “Cats,” his breakout success, he was like every other producer, asking, “How the f— am I going to get enough money to put the show on?” But even then, money wasn’t his central concern. “I have to fall in love with
the story, the characters and the music and lyrics,” he says. “The writing is the thing that attracts me. Unless there’s something about the story and the characters that I feel personally I can understand … unless somehow I’ve got something I can bring to it, I don’t do the show. I think I would just be a pain in the ass.”
He says he’s still annoying once he signs on to a project. “I think the thing that makes me probably irritating as well” is that “I’m involved in every single thing, every aspect of the show,” from the writing to casting, from promotional artwork to orchestrations. Working with orchestrators, “I make grunts, but they brilliantly turn my grunts into something else.”
The only part he’s not involved with is “the most important element, which is the inspiration for how you tell a story, which can only come from the writers. I don’t have original ideas. What I know is how to make other people’s originality fly. That’s what I’m good at; I’m putting the right teams together to make that happen.”
Mackintosh got hooked on producing as a child from seeing the musical “Salad Days,” which was about a piano with the magic power to make everyone who hears it want to dance. “It was being taken backstage on my eighth birthday, seeing how the scenery came together, how the pianos worked, how everything worked. It was my Road to Damascus moment. I went, ‘Yup, that’s what I want to do. I want to put all this together.’” He remembers being asked if he was going to be an impresario. “When I was 8½, I said, ‘I don’t want to be an impresario. Impresarios put on other people’s work. I want to put on my own.’ ”
If some theatergoers deride Mackintosh’s repertoire as cheesy or overwrought, he says, “(A), they’re in a minority and (B), you can’t please everybody. I hope they find their equivalent.” He doesn’t buy the bromide that theater is in crisis. “As the world is in turmoil at the moment ... theater is still a place that people want to go to. Rather than shun it, they actually embrace it.”
That argument has irrefutable evidence in “Hamilton,” which Mackintosh is co-producing in London. “It absolutely speaks to audiences of all ages and all nationalities. It’s not because everyone’s got a degree in American politics. It’s because Lin (Manuel Miranda)’s libretto is so brilliant. It’s so well observed of humanity, that we all recognize, wherever we are in the world, that this is a both historical and entirely contemporary story.”
In bringing new versions of “Les Miz,” ”Phantom” and “Miss Saigon” to San Francisco, Mackintosh stresses that he’s probably his teams’ “toughest taskmaster . ... I don’t want to do it new just for the sake of it; I want to do it new because it brings something fresh to a muchloved tale. And if it wasn’t for how great these shows were originally, we would not have the privilege of being able to do them in a new way.”
His new “Les Miz” will be much more colorful and “more cinematic” than the original version, drawing on the paintings of Victor Hugo, who wrote the novel on which the show is based. “It came from an idea from Matt (Kinley, the show’s designer.) ... He said, ‘Did I realize how many paintings Victor Hugo had done?’ I went, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, guess.’ I said, ‘Oh, a dozen.’ He said, ‘No. 400.’ “
The new “Phantom” is “more visceral,” Mackintosh says. “It dwells much more on the backstage story, in the sewers, in the lake” — the subterranean domain of the Phantom. “You feel much more of the underworld.”
For all the international tours he’s producing at any given time, Mackintosh insists that he loves going on holidays, that he loves the “six or seven hundred” cows that graze on his Somerset farm. He has “great grass,” which makes for “really, really good milk.” He’s “never short of a good piece of cheese.”
He might only have a few more new shows left in him, and he only keeps working because “I can still find exciting new talent.” He can still “get something new out of the show” or “improve the design.”
“I never take for granted how important it is,” he adds “for people who are going to come and see a show, to see something fresh.”